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.
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.
I am absolutely against positive thinking. You will be surprised that if you don't choose, if you remain in a choiceless awareness, your life will start expressing something which is beyond both positive and negative, which is higher than both. So you are not going to be a loser. It is not going to be negative, it is not going to be positive, it is going to be existential.
What, then is law [government]? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.
How interesting it would be to write the story of the experiences in this life of a man who killed himself in his previous life; how he stumbles against the very demands which had offered themselves before, until he arrives at the realization that he must fulfill those demands. The deeds of the preceding life give direction to the present life.
I have discovered that for me - now, maybe it doesn't work for everybody - for me, it is much more effective to arrive at any situation as a man from Mars than to try to fit in.
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