Maxim Gorky
When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Happiness
Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children.Collection: Future
A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.
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.
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.
You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.
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.
You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.
When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.
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?
In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty'.
In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.
Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.
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.Collection: Lying
Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.Collection: Book
Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.Collection: Kindness
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.Collection: People
Our most merciless enemy is our past.Collection: Past
Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.Collection: Truth
Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.Collection: Art
Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the futureCollection: Past
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!Collection: Long
In the carriages of the past, you can't go anywhere.Collection: Past
Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.Collection: Truth
When the life is monotonous , even grief is a welcome event.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Wedding
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.Collection: Believe
Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.Collection: Air
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Song
Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.Collection: Men
Intellectual force is qualitatively the first and foremost productive force, and concern for its rapid growth should be the ardent concern of all classes.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Horse
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?Collection: Children
Talent I say is what an actor needs. And talent is faith in oneself, one's own powers.Collection: Needs
To an old man any place that's warm is homeland.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
But I'm not to be caught with such poor bait! I'm a big fish, I am.Collection: Big Fish
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.Collection: Garden
Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?Collection: Truth
Processing the human raw material is naturally more complicated than processing lumber.Collection: Raw Materials