Maxim Gorky Quotes

When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid. The best pleasure and the highest joy in life is to feel confident that we are loved. 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. 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. A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have a brains. All that is beautiful in person is from the sun and the mother's milk. You will not drown the truth in seas of blood. Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent. I do not care to see men better off, but better! Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself. If nobody loves you its not reasonable to live in this world. 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. 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. When work is a pleasure, life is a joy. When work is a duty, life is slavery! 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. You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.

Maxim Gorky

1868 - 1936