The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
Interpretation
Art has the ability to awaken and enhance the positive aspects of our inner selves.
Maxim Gorky's quote emphasizes the significant role of art in elevating our good qualities and enriching our souls. While science embodies the intellect and rationality of the world, art represents the emotional and soulful side of humanity, showcasing how creativity can tap into our inner depths and foster personal growth and understanding.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of arts education, this quote can illustrate the transformative power of creativity.
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.
Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.
Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.
Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.
Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.
I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.
Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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