Top 100 Gorky Quotes
#1. Bangkok 8 is one of the most startling and provocative mysteries that I've read in years. The characters are marvelously unique, the setting is intoxicating and the plot unwinds in dark illusory strands, reminiscent of Gorky Park. Once I started, I didn't want to put it down.
Carl Hiaasen
#2. The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can't live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky.
Svetlana Alexievich
#3. The 'noble savage' whom the Populists had seen in the simple peasant was, as Gorky now concluded, no more than a romantic illusion. And the more he experienced the everyday life of the peasant, the more he denounced them as savage and barbaric.
Orlando Figes
#4. Was it Gorky who said: If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered in vain, indeed you have lived in vain.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#5. Gorky called for the building of a monument to the young martyr, who, the writer said, had 'understood that a relative by blood may also be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared'.69
Orlando Figes
#6. 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
#7. Anger is like ice, and also quick to melt
Maxim Gorky
#8. 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
#9. My recollections of Armenia open new visions for me. My art is therefore a growth art where forms, pines, shapes, memories of Armenia germinate, breathe, expand and contract, multiply and thereby create new paths for exploration.
Arshile Gorky
#10. 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
#11. If a painting of mine suits me, it is right. If it does not please me, I care not if all the great masters should approve it or the dealers buy it. They would be wrong.
Arshile Gorky
#12. Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.
Maxim Gorky
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. The secret is to throw yourself into the water of life again and again, not to hang back, no reservations, risk everything, but above all strike out boldly with all you have.
Arshile Gorky
#19. 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
#21. The eyes of the Armenians speak long before the lips move and long after they cease to.
Arshile Gorky
#22. 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
#23. If Picasso drips, I drip ... For a long while I was with Cezanne, and now I am with Picasso.
Arshile Gorky
#24. 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
#25. Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future
Maxim Gorky
#26. You will not drown the truth in seas of blood
Maxim Gorky
#27. Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.
Maxim Gorky
#28. When work is a pleasure, life is a joy. When work is a duty, life is slavery!
Maxim Gorky
#29. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush.
Arshile Gorky
#30. Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.
Maxim Gorky
#31. Even a bad man is better than a good book.
Maxim Gorky
#32. We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing. Our knowledge allows us to make use of all the forces already in existence, our art to interpret emotions already felt. One big war, an epidemic, and we collapse into ignorance and darkness, fit sons of chimpanzees.
Arshile Gorky
#33. 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
#34. What can you do by killing? Nothing. You kill one dog, the master buys another-that's all there is to it.
Maxim Gorky
#35. The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.
Peter Ackroyd
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.
Arshile Gorky
#40. Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.
Maxim Gorky
#41. 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
#42. I seek a form of language which will express my ideas for our time.
Arshile Gorky
#43. 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
#44. You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.
Maxim Gorky
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.
Arshile Gorky
#49. To an old man any place that's warm is homeland.
Maxim Gorky
#50. The pleasure of living carries with it the obligation to die.
Maxim Gorky
#51. Talent I say is what an actor needs. And talent is faith in oneself, one's own powers.
Maxim Gorky
#52. Our salvation is in work, but let us also take delight in that work.
Maxim Gorky
#53. 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
#54. God created man in his own image and after his own likeness. Therefore he is like man if man is like him.
Maxim Gorky
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.
Maxim Gorky
#59. One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.
Maxim Gorky
#60. Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes ... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.
Arshile Gorky
#61. Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.
Arshile Gorky
#62. 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
#63. Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?
Maxim Gorky
#64. Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.
Maxim Gorky
#65. Art must always remain earnest ... Art must be serious, no sarcasm, comedy. One does not laugh at a loved one.
Arshile Gorky
#66. 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
#67. [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
#68. 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
#69. When a person expends the least possible amount of energy on a certain act, that is grace.
Anton Chekhov
#70. With his own money a person can live as he likes-a ruble that's your own is dearer than a brother.
Maxim Gorky
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
Maxim Gorky
#75. One word of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole ode from a man .
Maxim Gorky
#76. When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting - I just stop working on it for a while.
Arshile Gorky
#77. Hunger can explain many acts. It can be said that all vile acts are done to satisfy hunger.
Maxim Gorky
#78. 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
#79. When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.
Maxim Gorky
#80. All parents wash away their sins with their tears; you are not the only one.
Maxim Gorky
#81. The poor people are stupid from poverty, and the rich from greed.
Maxim Gorky
#82. 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
#83. The indifferent pendulum of the clock kept chopping off the seconds of life, calmly and precisely.
Maxim Gorky
#84. You know how fussy and particular I am in painting. I am ever removing the paint and repainting the spot until I am completely exhausted.
Arshile Gorky
#85. In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
Maxim Gorky
#86. But I'm not to be caught with such poor bait! I'm a big fish, I am.
Maxim Gorky
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. When the life is monotonous , even grief is a welcome event ...
Maxim Gorky
#90. In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
Maxim Gorky
#91. 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
#92. An honest man is all right even if he's an idiot ... but a crook must have brains.
Maxim Gorky
#93. Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.
Maxim Gorky
#94. We ever long for visions of beauty,
We ever dream of unknown worlds.
Maxim Gorky
#95. Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.
Maxim Gorky
#96. Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children.
Maxim Gorky
#97. 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
#98. All human beings have gray little souls-and they all want to rouge them up.
Maxim Gorky
#99. And he's direct, clear, firm, like truth itself.
Maxim Gorky
#100. 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
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