Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Maxim Gorky

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Russian writer Maxim Gorky.
Last updated on September 19, 2024.
Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, popularly known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian writer and political activist. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.
You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better. — © Maxim Gorky
You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.
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?
When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'.
You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.
When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.
A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.
Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children.
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.
In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
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.
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
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 '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.
One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.
When the life is monotonous , even grief is a welcome event.
Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future
You will not drown the truth in seas of blood
Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.
All human beings have gray little souls-and they all want to rouge them up.
With his own money a person can live as he likes-a ruble that's your own is dearer than a brother.
You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.
All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I've even heard people say that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens.
Even a bad man is better than a good book.
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.
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.
In the carriages of the past, you can't go anywhere.
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.
Our salvation is in work, but let us also take delight in that work.
Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.
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.
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!
Talent I say is what an actor needs. And talent is faith in oneself, one's own powers.
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.
We ever long for visions of beauty, We ever dream of unknown worlds.
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 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.
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public. — © Maxim Gorky
Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One word of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole ode from a man . .
Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.
Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.
Hunger can explain many acts. It can be said that all vile acts are done to satisfy hunger.
Every new time will give its law.
Our most merciless enemy is our past. — © Maxim Gorky
Our most merciless enemy is our past.
The revolution has overthrown the monarchy, true! But perhaps this means that the revolution simply has driven the skin disease inside the organism.
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.
An honest man is all right even if he's an idiot...but a crook must have brains.
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.
Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.
Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.
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.
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!
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.
The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life.
Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.
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