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All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.

— Maurice Maeterlinck

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Death

More quotes by Maurice Maeterlinck

I know that you are looking for the Blue Bird, that is to say, the great secret of things and of happiness, so that Man may make our servitude still harder.

The Blue Bird (1908)

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

The New Dictionary of Thoughts: A Cyclopedia of Quotations (1960)

It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that lies in others.

Wisdom and Destiny (1898)

Men's weaknesses are often necessary to the purposes of life.

The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most.

All Maurice Maeterlinck quotes →

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To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929)

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die.

Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

The thunderstorm is a constant phenomenon, raging alternately over some part of the world or the other. Can a single man or creature escape death if all that charge of lightning strikes the earth?

Kalki Krishnamurthy Sivakozhundu of Tiruvazhundur (1939)

So what if a kid dies? God will take care of him.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Maurice Maeterlinck (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.