Wit & Attitude Quote by Maxim Gorky

Comfort doesn’t just dull the edge; it rusts the whole blade. Gorky’s line lands like a slap because it refuses the popular fantasy that ease is the natural reward of progress. For a writer who came up through poverty, political repression, and the bruising churn of late-imperial Russia, “easy” isn’t a synonym for peace. It’s a solvent. It dissolves alertness, curiosity, and the hard-won habits of thinking that come from having to navigate constraints.

The sentence is engineered for speed: “everything,” “easy,” “quickly,” “stupid.” No qualifiers, no mercy. That absolutism is the point. Gorky isn’t offering a psychological observation so much as a moral warning: intellect is not a permanent possession; it’s a practice maintained under pressure. Take away friction and the mind defaults to autopilot. “Stupid” here reads less like an insult than a diagnosis of unexercised perception - the gradual surrender to cliché, passivity, and the convenient answer.

Context matters. Gorky wrote in a moment when modernization promised comfort while political life demanded vigilance. His revolutionary sympathies also sharpen the subtext: a society engineered to keep you comfortable can also keep you compliant. Ease can be a kind of governance.

The quote works because it’s antagonistic to the reader’s self-image. It implies that what you call “making life simpler” might be quietly making you less alive to complexity - and that the cost of convenience is paid in attention.