Top 93 Maxim Gorky Quotes
#1. Much later I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow--to play with it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being unhappy.
Maxim Gorky
#2. Anger is like ice, and also quick to melt
Maxim Gorky
#3. Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.
Maxim Gorky
#4. 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!
Maxim Gorky
#5. Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.
Maxim Gorky
#6. It is quiet and peaceful here, the air is good, there are numerous gardens, and in them nightingales sing and spies lurk under the bushes.
Maxim Gorky
#7. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#8. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#9. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#10. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#11. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#13. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#14. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#15. Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future
Maxim Gorky
#16. You will not drown the truth in seas of blood
Maxim Gorky
#17. Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.
Maxim Gorky
#18. When work is a pleasure, life is a joy. When work is a duty, life is slavery!
Maxim Gorky
#19. Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.
Maxim Gorky
#20. Even a bad man is better than a good book.
Maxim Gorky
#21. Once there was a crow, it flew from the field to the hill, from hedge to hedge, and lived its life. then it died and rotted away. -what's the sense in it? there just ISN'T any!
Maxim Gorky
#22. What can you do by killing? Nothing. You kill one dog, the master buys another-that's all there is to it.
Maxim Gorky
#23. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#24. The number of books increased on the shelves neatly made for him by one of his carpenter friends. The room began to look like a home.
Maxim Gorky
#25. Man made another imperceptible step toward his grave; but he saw close before him the delights of rest, the joys of the odorous tavern, and he was satisfied.
Maxim Gorky
#26. Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.
Maxim Gorky
#27. God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.
Maxim Gorky
#28. 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!
Maxim Gorky
#29. You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.
Maxim Gorky
#31. The revolution has overthrown the monarchy, true! But perhaps this means that the revolution simply has driven the skin disease inside the organism.
Maxim Gorky
#32. All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I have even heard it said that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens.
Maxim Gorky
#33. To an old man any place that's warm is homeland.
Maxim Gorky
#34. The pleasure of living carries with it the obligation to die.
Maxim Gorky
#35. Talent I say is what an actor needs. And talent is faith in oneself, one's own powers.
Maxim Gorky
#36. Our salvation is in work, but let us also take delight in that work.
Maxim Gorky
#37. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#38. God created man in his own image and after his own likeness. Therefore he is like man if man is like him.
Maxim Gorky
#39. The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round in rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal impeccability, do not understand this.
Maxim Gorky
#40. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#41. Let us not search for the guilty ones only among others, let us speak the bitter truth: we are all guilty ... each and every one of us.
Maxim Gorky
#42. A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.
Maxim Gorky
#43. One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.
Maxim Gorky
#44. And this was the end of my first friendship with one of that innumerable company of people who are foreigners in their own country, but who are in reality its finest sons ...
Maxim Gorky
#45. Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?
Maxim Gorky
#46. Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.
Maxim Gorky
#47. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#48. [Politics] is the seedbed of social enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual. Name anything bad in man, and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with abundance.
Maxim Gorky
#49. Those - " - here he flung out a terrible oath - "those people don't know what their blind hands are sowing. They will know when our power is complete and we begin to mow down their cursed grass. They'll know it then!
Maxim Gorky
#50. With his own money a person can live as he likes-a ruble that's your own is dearer than a brother.
Maxim Gorky
#51. The Englishman walks before the law like a trained horse in the circus. He has the sense of legality in his bones, in his muscles.
Maxim Gorky
#53. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#54. Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
Maxim Gorky
#55. One word of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole ode from a man .
Maxim Gorky
#56. Hunger can explain many acts. It can be said that all vile acts are done to satisfy hunger.
Maxim Gorky
#57. What I'd like is to meet a man I could take off my hat to and say: Thank you for having got born, and the longer you live the better.
Maxim Gorky
#58. When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.
Maxim Gorky
#59. All parents wash away their sins with their tears; you are not the only one.
Maxim Gorky
#60. The poor people are stupid from poverty, and the rich from greed.
Maxim Gorky
#61. In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face.
Maxim Gorky
#62. The indifferent pendulum of the clock kept chopping off the seconds of life, calmly and precisely.
Maxim Gorky
#63. In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
Maxim Gorky
#64. But I'm not to be caught with such poor bait! I'm a big fish, I am.
Maxim Gorky
#65. However low he may fall, a man can never deny himself the delight of feeling cleverer, more powerful or even better fed than his companions.
Maxim Gorky
#66. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#67. When the life is monotonous , even grief is a welcome event ...
Maxim Gorky
#68. In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
Maxim Gorky
#69. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#70. An honest man is all right even if he's an idiot ... but a crook must have brains.
Maxim Gorky
#71. Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.
Maxim Gorky
#72. We ever long for visions of beauty,
We ever dream of unknown worlds.
Maxim Gorky
#73. Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.
Maxim Gorky
#74. Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children.
Maxim Gorky
#75. I did not speak," continued Pavel, "about that good and gracious God in whom you believe, but about the God with whom the priests threaten us as with a stick, about the God in whose name they want to force all of us to the evil will of the few.
Maxim Gorky
#76. All human beings have gray little souls-and they all want to rouge them up.
Maxim Gorky
#77. And he's direct, clear, firm, like truth itself.
Maxim Gorky
#78. This society of 'creatures that once were men' had one fine characteristic - no one of them endeavored to make out that he was better than the others, nor compelled the others to acknowledge his superiority.
Maxim Gorky
#79. In war it is necessary to kill as many people as possible
such is the cynical logic of war. Brutality in a fight is unavoidable; have you seen how cruelly children fight in the streets?
Maxim Gorky
#80. But 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 ...
Maxim Gorky
#81. Yes, the rich. And that's their misfortune. You see, if you keep adding copper bit by bit to a child's food, you prevent the growth of its bones, and he'll be a dwarf; and if from his youth up you poison a man with gold, you deaden his soul. Once,
Maxim Gorky
#82. Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man's audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.
Maxim Gorky
#83. Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.
Maxim Gorky
#84. Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.
Maxim Gorky
#85. You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.
Maxim Gorky
#86. Intellectual force is qualitatively the first and foremost productive force, and concern for its rapid growth should be the ardent concern of all classes.
Maxim Gorky
#87. The doleful, ugly sounds became entangled in his whiskers.
Maxim Gorky
#88. 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.
Maxim Gorky
#89. Keep reading books, but remember that a book's only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.
Maxim Gorky
#90. Jazz may be a thrilling communion with the primitive soul; or it may be an ear-splitting bore.
Maxim Gorky
#91. For sadness and gladness live within us side by side, almost inseparable; the one succeeding the other with an elusive, unappreciable swiftness.
Maxim Gorky
#92. You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.
Maxim Gorky
#93. 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?
Maxim Gorky
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