Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself. Maxim Gorky
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.
Talent I say is what an actor needs. And talent is faith in oneself, one’s own powers.
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.
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.
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.”
You can’t do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.
To an old man any place that’s warm is homeland.
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.
All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I’ve even heard people say that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens.
Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.
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?
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.
Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
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.
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.
The revolution has overthrown the monarchy, true! But perhaps this means that the revolution simply has driven the skin disease inside the organism.
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.
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.
The Most Inspiring Maxim Gorky Quotes
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
The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life.
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.
Intellectual force is qualitatively the first and foremost productive force, and concern for its rapid growth should be the ardent concern of all classes.
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.
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.
What can you do by killing? Nothing. You kill one dog, the master buys another-that’s all there is to it.
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.
Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.
Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.
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!
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.
With his own money a person can live as he likes-a ruble that’s your own is dearer than a brother.
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?
Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.
Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.
