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Quote by Leo Tolstoy
English (Source)
I dreamed that someone gave me a letter or a prayer of the abbot of Optina (I forgot his name), the teaching abbot, and I read and am delighted with this writing. It contains so many wonderful things, quiet, full of old, loving wisdom, but I forgot all but one thing that moved me powerfully: that he can teach no one, nor advise him what to do. He cannot teach him, firstly because he does not consider himself higher and wiser than that, whoever he may be, secondly, because all a man needs to know is told in revelation (so says the old man) and in everyone's heart. And he cannot advise what to do because no one knows and cannot know which circumstance or deed will bring an apparent, corporal, greater good.