Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, 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. Wikipedia

• Born: March 16, 1868, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

• Died: June 18, 1936, Gorki-10

• Written: Mother, The Life of Klim Samgin, Autobiographies of Maxim Gorky, The Artamonov Business, The Life of a Useless Man, Foma Gordeyev, A Confession

GREAT THOUGHTS OF GORKY

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

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.

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.

When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.

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.

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.

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.

All of us are pilgrims on this earth. I've even heard people say that the earth itself is a pilgrim in the heavens.

An honest man is all right even if he's an idiot...but a crook must have brains.

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.

The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life.