It is the disaster of our entire existence that we live thus away from our soul, and stand in such dread of its slightest movement. Did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. We have only to think for an instant how much it succeeds in accomplishing during those rare moments when we knock off its chains for it is our custom to enchain it as though it were distraught what it does in love, for instance, for there we do permit it at times to approach the lattices of external life.
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About Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck was a 19th-century Belgian playwright and essayist. Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also known as Count/Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations". Read more on Wikipedia →