Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.
Interpretation
The quote encourages compassion and kindness towards others.
Maxim Gorky's quote emphasizes the importance of moral values such as kindness, charity, and forgiveness. It advocates for a compassionate approach toward fellow humans, urging individuals to treat others with love and understanding, console those in distress, and forgive wrongdoings, fostering a more humane society.
In practice
In a community meeting discussing ways to support local charities, someone could quote Gorky to emphasize the importance of giving back.
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.
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.
A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.
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.
Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.
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.
The humanity that is given to other people isn't given to us. There is an expendability that comes along with being African American.
It [a new world order] needs only that the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia should get together in order to set up an effective control of currency, credit, production, and distribution – that is to say, an effective ‘dictatorship of prosperity,’ for the whole world. The other sixty odd States would have to join in or accommodate themselves to the over-ruling decisions of these major Powers.
Law is the highest reason implanted in Nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite.
Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.
Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.
Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.
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