The less you speak, the more you will hear.

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

A drop in the ocean has no fear of a hurricane.

You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance. You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale.

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.

A horrible human toll the Russian Orthodox Church suffered throughout almost the entire 20th century. The Church is just rising from its knees. Our young post-Soviet state is just learning to respect the Church as an independent institution.