Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March 1868 – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer and socialist political thinker and proponent. 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.

Maxim Gorky

1. “When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.”
— Maxim Gorky

2. “Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.”
— Maxim Gorky

3. “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.”
— Maxim Gorky

4. “Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.”
— Maxim Gorky

5. “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

6. “Truth doesn’t always heal a wounded soul.”
— Maxim Gorky

7. “When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.”
— Maxim Gorky

8. “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

9. “When the life is monotonous, even grief is a welcome event…”
— Maxim Gorky

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Our most merciless enemy is our past.”
— Maxim Gorky

13. “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

14. “Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.”
— Maxim Gorky

15. “You can’t do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.”
— Maxim Gorky

16. “The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life.”
— Maxim Gorky

17. “A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.”
— Maxim Gorky

18. “Even a bad man is better than a good book.”
— Maxim Gorky

19. “Every new time will give its law.”
— Maxim Gorky

20. “In the carriages of the past, you can’t go anywhere.”
— Maxim Gorky

21. “Only mothers can think of the future – because they give birth to it in their children.”
— Maxim Gorky

22. “We ever long for visions of beauty, We ever dream of unknown worlds.”
— Maxim Gorky

23. “Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.”
— Maxim Gorky

24. “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

25. “We know nothing, and in terror we fear everything. Our life is night, a dark night;.”
— Maxim Gorky

26. “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

27. “But I’m not to be caught with such poor bait! I’m a big fish, I am.”
— Maxim Gorky

28. “Anger is like ice, and also quick to melt.”
— Maxim Gorky

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.”
— Maxim Gorky

32. “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

33. “You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.”
— Maxim Gorky

34. “Hunger can explain many acts. It can be said that all vile acts are done to satisfy hunger.”
— Maxim Gorky

35. “I guess they were telling the truth when they said you carried forbidden books to the factory.” “Who said so?” asked Pavel. “Oh, people. Well, good-by! Behave yourselves!” The mother laughed softly; she was pleased to hear that such things were said of her. Pavel smilingly turned to her: “Oh, you’ll get into prison, mother!” “I don’t mind,” she murmured.”
— Maxim Gorky

36. “Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.”
— Maxim Gorky

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Talent I say is what an actor needs. And talent is faith in oneself, one’s own powers.”
— Maxim Gorky

40. “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

41. “Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future.”
— Maxim Gorky

42. “The poor people are stupid from poverty, and the rich from greed.”
— Maxim Gorky

43. “Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.”
— Maxim Gorky

44. “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

45. “You will not drown the truth in seas of blood.”
— Maxim Gorky

46. “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

47. “One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn’t marry a girl of twenty.”
— Maxim Gorky

48. “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

49. “All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I’ve even heard people say that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens.”
— Maxim Gorky

50. “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

51. “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

52. “The pleasure of living carries with it the obligation to die.”
— Maxim Gorky

53. “All human beings have gray little souls-and they all want to rouge them up.”
— Maxim Gorky

54. “To an old man any place that’s warm is homeland.”
— Maxim Gorky

55. “I don’t ask you to believe me; I want you just to listen to me!” And if they listen, they will believe.”
— Maxim Gorky

56. “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

57. “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

58. “From where do the people draw their power to suffer?” “They get used to it,” responded the mother with a sigh.”
— Maxim Gorky

59. “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

60. “For sadness and gladness live within us side by side, almost inseparable; the one succeeding the other with an elusive, unappreciable swiftness.”
— Maxim Gorky

61. “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

62. “They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master – I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov – my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That’s for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood.”
— Maxim Gorky

63. “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

64. “With his own money a person can live as he likes-a ruble that’s your own is dearer than a brother.”
— Maxim Gorky

65. “What can you do by killing? Nothing. You kill one dog, the master buys another-that’s all there is to it.”
— Maxim Gorky

66. “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

67. “Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.”
— Maxim Gorky

68. “The indifferent pendulum of the clock kept chopping off the seconds of life, calmly and precisely.”
— Maxim Gorky

69. “I was consumed by a restless curiosity, a thirst for knowing everything in the shortest possible time. This is a side of my character that has prevented me all my life from devoting myself seriously to any one thing.”
— Maxim Gorky

70. “And he’s direct, clear, firm, like truth itself.”
— Maxim Gorky

71. “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

72. “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. “God created man in his own image and after his own likeness. Therefore he is like man if man is like him.”
— 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. “Yes, our children are our judges. They visit just punishment upon us for abandoning them on such a road.”
— Maxim Gorky

76. “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

77. “Aside from kringles, we gave Tanya much advice – to dress warmer, not to run fast on the stairs, and not to carry heavy bundles of wood. With a smile she listened, answered in a laugh and never obeyed us, but we were not offended: we only wanted to show that we were concerned for her.”
— Maxim Gorky

78. “A man who has good in him does not mind sometimes showing his worse nature.”
— Maxim Gorky

79. “It’s fear that’s the ruin of us. And those who boss us take advantage of our fear and keep bullying us.”
— Maxim Gorky

80. “Meeting one another they spoke about the factory and the machines, had their fling against their foreman, conversed and thought only of matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only rarely, and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent thought glimmer in the wearisome monotony of their talk.”
— Maxim Gorky

81. “Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?”
— Maxim Gorky

82. “Everything seems simple and near. Then, all of a sudden, I cannot understand this simplicity. Again, I’m calm. In a second I grow fearful, because I am calm. I always used to be afraid, my whole life long; but now that there’s a great deal to be afraid of, I have very little fear. Why is it? I cannot understand.”
— Maxim Gorky

83. “All parents wash away their sins with their tears; you are not the only one.”
— Maxim Gorky

84. “It’s not people, but thoughts, and thoughts are not fleas; you can’t catch them!”
— Maxim Gorky

85. “Our salvation is in work, but let us also take delight in that work.”
— Maxim Gorky

86. “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

87. “A man must preserve himself for his work and must be thoroughly acquainted with the road to it. A man, dear, is like the pilot on a ship. In youth, as at high tide, go straight! A way is open to you everywhere. But you must know when it is time to steer. The waters recede – here you see a sandbank, there, a rock; it is necessary to know all this and to slip off in time, in order to reach the harbour safe and sound.”
— Maxim Gorky

88. “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

89. “And the pregnancy made Natalya more morose and silent, as though she were looking still deeper into herself, absorbed in the throbbing of new life within her. But the smile on her lips became clearer, and in her eyes flashed at times something new, weak and timid, like the first ray of the dawn.”
— Maxim Gorky

90. “Jazz may be a thrilling communion with the primitive soul; or it may be an ear-splitting bore.”
— Maxim Gorky

91. “They command you, ‘Be what I want you to be – a wolf, a pig’ – but to be a man is prohibited.”
— Maxim Gorky

92. “Not everybody has overshoes and an umbrella, but everybody desires in some way, however small, to appear more important than his neighbor.”
— Maxim Gorky

93. “I will go there, and I will work my way until I become the President of the United States, and then I will challenge the whole of Europe to war and I will blow it up! I will buy the army… in Europe that is – I will invite the French, the Germans, the Turks, and so on, and I will kill them by the hands of their own relatives… Just as Elia Marumets bought a Tartar with a Tartar.”
— Maxim Gorky

94. “I am mistrustful of Russians in power – recently slaves themselves, they will become unbridled despots as soon as they have the chance to be their neighbours’ masters.”
— Maxim Gorky