Maxim Gorky Quotes

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

We kill everybody, my dear. Some with bullets, some with words, and everybody with our deeds. We drive people into their graves, and neither see it nor feel it.

Politics is the soil in which the nettle of poisonous enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, slander, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual grows rapidly and luxuriantly. Name anything bad in man and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with particular liveliness and abundance.

Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children.

Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.

When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.

Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.

Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.

Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.

In the carriages of the past, you can't go anywhere.

Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.

The poor are always rich in children, and in the dirt and ditches of this street there are groups of them from morning to night, hungry, naked and dirty. Children are the living flowers of the earth, but these had the appearance of flowers that have faded prematurely, because they grew in ground where there was no healthy nourishment.

Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future

When a woman gets married it is like jumping into a hole in the ice in the middle of winter: you do it once and you remember it the rest of your days.

You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'.

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.

Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.

When the life is monotonous , even grief is a welcome event.

The higher goal a person pursues, the quicker his ability develops, and the more beneficial he will become to the society. I believe for sure that this is also a truth.

If it is true that only misfortune can awaken a man's soul, it is a bitter truth, one that is hard to hear and accept, and it is only natural that many people deny it and say it is better for a man to live on in a trance than to wake up to torture.

Our most merciless enemy is our past.

Silence is terrible and painful only to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to those who never had anything to say— to them silence is simple and easy.

What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.

A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.

To speak the truth is the most difficult of all arts, for in its "pure" form, not connected with the interests of individuals, groups, classes, or nations, truth is almost completely unsuitable for use by the Philistine and is unacceptable to him.

All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I've even heard people say that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens.

The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses.

Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man - Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?

Jail doesn't teach anyone to do good, nor Siberia, but a man-yes! A man can teach another man to do good-believe me!

The illness of a doctor is always worse than the illnesses of his patients.The patients only feel, but the doctor, as well as feeling, has a pretty good idea of the destructive effect of the disease on his constitution.This is a case in which knowledge brings death nearer.

All human beings have gray little souls-and they all want to rouge them up.

Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.

You will not drown the truth in seas of blood

The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life.

You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.

This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh. We must grow bold; it is time!

Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.

One word of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole ode from a man . .

It is quiet here and restful and the air is delicious. There are gardens everywhere and police spies lie in the bushes. There are nightingales in every garden, but police spies only in mine, I think. They sit under my windows in the darkness of the night and try to get a glimpse of how I spread sedition in Russia.

Every new time will give its law.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

Our salvation is in work, but let us also take delight in that work.

There is no one on earth more disgusting and repulsive than he who gives alms. Even as there is no one so miserable as he who accepts them.

When one loves somebody, everything is clear - where to go, what to do - it all takes care of itself and one doesn't have to ask anybody about anything.

All that is called Destiny or Fate is none other than the result of our thoughtlessness and our mistrust of ourselves; we should know that all that is created on earth is created by its sole Master and Laborer -- Man.

There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.

Talent I say is what an actor needs. And talent is faith in oneself, one's own powers.

Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.

Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.