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.
He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there.
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
When the great Tao is abandoned, benevolence and righteousness arise.
Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas... cultures... and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word 'freedom' means than I see much evidence of in America.
Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
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