Top 90 Maxim Gorky Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A man who has good in him does not mind sometimes showing his worse nature.”

— Maxim Gorky

52. “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

53. “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

54. “The pleasure of living carries with it the obligation to die.”

— Maxim Gorky

55. “All human beings have gray little souls-and they all want to rouge them up.”

— Maxim Gorky

56. “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

57. “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

58. “To an old man any place that’s warm is homeland.”

— Maxim Gorky

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Maxim Gorky

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

— 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. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Maxim Gorky

68. “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

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

— Maxim Gorky

70. “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

71. “Everywhere, within man and without, there is devastation, instability, chaos, and evidence of some prolonged rout.”

— Maxim Gorky

72. “And he’s direct, clear, firm, like truth itself.”

— Maxim Gorky

73. “Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.”

— Maxim Gorky

74. “God created man in his own image and after his own likeness. Therefore he is like man if man is like him.”

— Maxim Gorky

75. “The indifferent pendulum of the clock kept chopping off the seconds of life, calmly and precisely.”

— Maxim Gorky

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “Yes, our children are our judges. They visit just punishment upon us for abandoning them on such a road.”

— Maxim Gorky

81. “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

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

— Maxim Gorky

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

— Maxim Gorky

84. “All parents wash away their sins with their tears; you are not the only one.”

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

— Maxim Gorky

88. “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

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

— Maxim Gorky

90. “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

91. “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

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