This note is intended exclusively for wise Christians seeking the spiritual treasures of the Orthodox ascetics of antiquity. We present to our readers a selection of several magnificent [...]
This note is intended exclusively for wise Christians seeking the spiritual treasures of the Orthodox ascetics of antiquity.
We present to our readers a selection of several magnificent aphorisms and teachings belonging to the Holy Fathers of our Mother Church. We hope that through them each of you will benefit in the development of your soul and intellect!
St. Ambrose of Milan on human dignity:
“Do not be groveling yourself, and do not allow others to humiliate themselves before you and flatter you: the first is the characteristic of a cunning and treacherous person, and the latter is the characteristic of a vain and proud person.”
St. John of Kronstadt about why a person needs the Church:
“The Church is the earthly heaven: as long as I am in church and heartily participate in worship, I occupy my soul with worship, prayer, reading or singing, until then, as in heaven, I soar with love for God, for the inhabitants of heaven, I repent, I am touched, shed tears, I sympathize to all humanity, especially brothers and sisters of the same faith; and when I leave the church, I am exposed to the temptations of the passions: irritation, anger, sensuality, envy, pride, hostility, laziness of thought and feeling - in a word, I become a target, a target for all sorts of demonic temptations. The Church is a safe fence for all its devoted children; outside the church I am prey for enemies or a place of attack for invisible archers. How necessary for a Christian is the church, its services, teachings, and guiding sacraments! We are all so weak, sinful, defenseless on our own, so we need help and protection.”
St. Ambrose of Optina on how to avoid condemnation:
“You need to pay attention to your inner life so as not to notice what is happening around you. Then you won’t judge.”
St. John Chrysostom on the equality of men and women:
“Be attentive to yourself. A wife, if she is kind, can be your helper. What if she's unkind? Make her good. Didn’t others have wives, both good and evil, so that you would not have an excuse to justify yourself? What was Job's wife like? On the contrary, Sarah was kind. I will point you to a thin and evil wife. Job's wife did not harm her husband. She was thin and angry and advised him to blaspheme. What? Has she shaken this fortress? Did she crush this adamant? Did you overcome this rock? Did she hit this warrior? Has this ship been overthrown? Has this tree been uprooted? Not at all. She attacked, and the fortress became stronger; she raised waves, and the ship did not sink, but sailed calmly; the fruits of the tree were torn off, but the tree itself did not shake; the leaves fell, but the root remained solid. I say this so that no one refers to the wife’s anger. How bad is she? Fix her. She, you say, deprived me of paradise. But she also took you to heaven. The nature is the same, but the mental mood is different. How bad is Job's wife? But Susanna is good. Shameless Egyptian? But Sarah is modest. Do you see that one? Look at this one too. And some of the husbands are evil, and others are good. Joseph was beautiful, but his elder brothers were shameless. Do you see evil and virtue everywhere, not arising from nature, but receiving their distinctive properties from the mood of the soul? Don’t give me excuses to justify yourself!”
St. Seraphim (Chichagov) about patience and constancy:
“Do not forget, brothers and sisters, this commandment of Christ and the Apostles. Every task is difficult at first, but when you get used to it, you will know how sweet the Name of the Lord is! St. Apostle Paul would not oblige us to pray if it were extremely difficult and impossible. Let us work with our bodies and at this time pray with our spirit! Let our outer man carry out his everyday affairs, and let our inner man be entirely devoted to serving God...”
St. Nektarios of Aegina on happiness:
“How mistaken are those people who seek happiness outside themselves - in foreign countries and travels, in wealth and fame, in great possessions and pleasures, in pleasures and in empty things that end in bitterness! Building a tower of happiness outside our heart is like building a house in a place that is subject to constant earthquakes. Happiness is found in ourselves, and blessed is the one who understands this... Happiness is a pure heart, because such a heart becomes the throne of God. This is what the Lord says for those who have a pure heart: “I will dwell in them and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they will be My people” (2 Cor. 6:16). What else could they be missing? Nothing, truly nothing! Because they have in their hearts the greatest good - God Himself!”
St. John Chrysostom on the condemnation of the hierarchy:
“Whoever honors a priest will also honor God, and whoever begins to despise a priest will one day gradually come to insult God... Even if the priest were wicked, God, seeing that you, out of reverence for Him, honor even those unworthy of honor, He himself will reward you. Please, I convince you
and I beg you to stop the bad habit of blaming your spiritual superiors. We do not harm the priests about whom we speak badly, not only when we speak a lie, but even if we speak the truth, but we destroy ourselves.”
St. John Climacus on natural talents:
“Whoever exalts himself with natural gifts, that is, wit, understanding, skill in reading and pronunciation, quickness of mind and other abilities that we have acquired without difficulty, will never receive supernatural benefits, for he who is unfaithful in little things is also unfaithful and vain in many things.”
St. Anthony the Great about communication with righteous people:
“A person who enters a seller of incense borrows a pleasant smell: and he who deals with pious men insensitively gets used to imitating their virtues.”
St. Tikhon of Zadonsk on cultivating love in oneself:
“Children learning to read first learn letters, then they learn to read letters, and then they learn to read books. This is what Christians should do in Christian teaching. First, one must learn to repay good for good, that is, to have gratitude; then do not repay evil for evil, annoyance for annoyance, insult for insult, and do not take revenge either in word or deed on the offender; and then to love enemies, and to do good to those who hate, and to repay good for evil. This is the ladder along which Christians ascend to perfection, which consists in love for enemies.”
St. Nilus of Sinai on Christian friendliness:
“A person should be a sociable and friendly being, and not lonely and unsociable, to bring benefit to others than only in his power, to prove his compassion with possible care, imitating the bodily members in their mutual contribution to the common benefit.”
St. Theophan the Recluse on the purpose of Christian life:
“The main goal of our life is living communication with God. For this purpose, the Son of God became incarnate, in order to restore to us such communion with God, lost through the Fall. Through the Lord Jesus, the Son of God, [we] enter into fellowship with the Father and thus achieve our goal.”
A little more Christian wisdom can be gleaned from.
Andrey Szegeda
In contact with
—Kurepina Margarita
MBOU "Gymnasium No. 3, grade 10
Essay topic: “Follow the rule persistently: so that words are cramped, thoughts are spacious” (N. A. Nekrasov)
Nomination "Best Essay on Conciseness of Language"
To my surprise, a recent quarrel with my best friend prompted me to think about the words of N.A. Nekrasov. In a quarrel, people say whatever comes to their mind, without thinking that the words spoken may offend the other person. It seems that it is impossible to be offended by one word, but said in the hearts, it can cause the loss of a loved one forever. In this case, brevity is not a panacea.
And what's about ordinary life? Ordinary conversations? Here smart people They are guided by the “Nekrasov rule”: the more they think, the less they speak. Why do you need empty chatter when you can say everything briefly and to the point?
From the time of Ancient Greece Conciseness is valued everywhere and everywhere. The Spartans were famous for their unsurpassed skill in battle and, at the same time, weakness in speeches, “... but - as Socrates once said - ... suddenly, in any place of speech, he will throw, like a mighty shooter, some precise saying, short and compressed, and the interlocutor seems like a small child in front of him.”
It is very difficult to convey your thoughts to your interlocutor in one phrase, but to this day, we often use in our speech words that have become aphorisms, spoken or written once upon a time by great people. “To be or not to be, that is the question,” wrote the great English poet William Shakespeare back in the sixteenth century. This short phrase, said in the context of thinking about life, has become a catchphrase, and now it can be heard even in discussions of everyday things.
In my opinion, laconic statements allow the imagination to develop, each person can understand them in their own way. When Goethe described Margarita in the tragedy Faust, he only mentioned:
“Oh heaven, such beauty!
I have never seen anything like it in my life.
How unspoiled and pure
And how mockingly and maliciously!
Crimson lips, blush cheeks, -
I will never forget them!..”
In fact, the author does not give us a description of the girl; the reader’s imagination itself draws it in his head. And everyone who reads Faust has their own Margarita. So there is an infinite number of these Margaritas in our common imagination.
And the same with folk genres. For example, Japanese lyric poetry - haiku:
Spring sea -
Waves sway and roll
All day long.
Yosa Buson
Just three lines, and when you close your eyes, a marvelous seascape appears before you, and you hear the sound of the waves, and your soul immediately feels so good, so calm, peaceful - your thoughts are carried away into the distance. Just three lines, and how many pictures your imagination has drawn!
Or for example proverbs, sayings. They contain everything folk wisdom! Everyone has been told since childhood: “You can’t even pull a fish out of a pond without effort,” “Don’t spit in the well, you’ll need to drink the water!”, “The word is not a sparrow, if it flies out, you won’t catch it!” This wisdom is immortal. It has been passed down from generation to generation, and I think it will continue to do so until the end of time.
When thinking about brevity and conciseness, one cannot help but mention Ernest Hemingway, who once bet that he could write the shortest story that could touch anyone. And he wrote. “Children's shoes for sale. Unworn." Now it has become a kind of movement - people are trying to fit a complete story into 6 words (as in Hemingway's original), and, in my opinion, they are doing great, and I hope that this movement will gain more followers.
IN modern world In a world of unnecessary noise, it is important to be able to speak clearly, briefly and to the point, as Anton Pavlovich Chekhov bequeathed - “Brevity is the sister of talent.”
A typical Soviet yard on the outskirts of the same typical city. Four high-rise buildings, arranged in the form of a rectangle. The children's playground, garages, the foundation of the gazebo, the sandbox, the benches at the entrances - everything repeated the shape of the yard, as if a child was unconsciously copying the habits of his parents. Sometimes it seemed that people had the same rectilinear outlines. A simple way of life and an uncomplicated life made them similar to each other.
The playground was fenced with a net - there was a mandatory hole in the net. Children were constantly playing with a rubber ball on the playground. A dog ran after them, whose name you could guess with three times– Sharik, Belchik (as an option – Chernysh) or Pirate. Among the attractions are a bread store, a shoemaker's booth and a forest belt behind one of the five-story buildings. There is the same ascetic bedlam. Mulberries and cherry plums, which were eaten by local punks before they had time to ripen, an abandoned well, several fallen trees. They cleared a place near one of them, quickly built a table and made a horizontal bar.
In the mornings, sometimes athletes in Dynamo T-shirts and tights with outstretched knees flashed there, and in the evenings they drank and walked. A little later, this place got a name - Skirda, which quite accurately reflected the essence of everything that happened there.
Zone hierarchy; playing cards - just like that and for money; port wine; the ground strewn with caps and broken bottles; girls; guitar. The six-string “debaucher” was replaced in the mid-80s by a tape recorder - a clumsy cassette player with the significant name “Romantic”. Yes, it was the romanticism of the late stagnation era. Vysotsky, Rosenbaum, a little later - “Cinema”, “Nautilus”, sometimes “Tender May”. To this music they lost their innocence and after that they no longer stood on ceremony with their body. They said about such people: they fell or fell into bad company. May God bless their memory - Vinogradova, Ukrainskaya, Bogovenko... Nurses - that’s what they were called, it seems, behind their backs. How many recruits of love have passed through their caring... (one would like to say – hands). Which of us will now remember our fighting friends? And where are they now? A long time ago, they got married and became devoted and caring wives for their beloved ones, or they disappeared somewhere in the confusion of the nineties. And we?.. Sometimes it seems that we don’t exist either, that we too have dissolved, gone through the fingers of that time when Tsoi, who was still alive, was finishing his last song.
So that words are cramped
A poet with an inspired look approaches the microphone stand, background music sounds from the speakers, and there is a slight twilight on the stage. In the minds of the listeners, the twilight is not so light, but that doesn’t matter. A strand of hair is thrown back in a highly artistic manner, and the ritual begins... Do poems need all this? Why not, someone will say, oil won’t spoil the porridge. But poetry is not a mess at all, and music is not butter either. And then the debate begins: they remember the bards, Ryazanov’s “The Irony of Fate” and, in the end, the conversation comes to Vysotsky and Okudzhava. This is all true. But in fairness, it should be noted that they mainly wrote their poems as songs, initially leaving room in the text for music, which connected the words like mortar connects bricks in masonry. But do poems as such need all this?
Answering this question with an unequivocal “no,” I recall Nekrasov’s message: “So that words are cramped, / Thoughts are spacious.” These are the real poems.
“Not a single empty place, as they say - there is nowhere for an apple to fall.”
And words are cramped, and thoughts are spacious. There is no place in them for games, music and other things, because they themselves are already games, music, life, death, whatever, and there is nothing to add there. Acting and directing, even the most brilliant, can only deform them, and therefore ruin them. The monotony of the voice with which poets read their creations only confirms this. In this manner, they seem to remove all obstacles on the path of the poem from the author to the listener: just the bare text, and nothing more. Many authors, of course, were and are flattered that music is written to their texts, and that readers howl and recite them from the stage. But there are plenty of counter-examples. Brodsky did not like it when songs were made from his poems. Chukhontsev treated the Moscow Art Theater school of poetry reading with hostility, starting from Kachalov and ending with Smoktunovsky. Smekhov’s experience is interesting in this sense. In one of his television poetry projects, he imitated the author's reading style and voice, explaining that he wanted to be as close to the original as possible. And to some extent he succeeded.
But time does not stand still, and neither does the poet, who is trying to keep up with it. Poems, music, photos, videos, the Internet - everything was completely mixed up. Eclecticism as an end in itself. The listener (aka reader) is completely disoriented. All these artistic media they take it very far from the original source and throw it halfway under the cultural fence without a sip. The theater closed, and the feeling of hunger only intensified...
Eckermann once boasted to Goethe that one of his friends was going to remake Byron’s drama “The Two Foscari” for the stage, to which he replied: “...If in reading some thing makes a great impression on us, we imagine that from the stage it will produce no less and that this can be achieved without much difficulty. But we fatal way we are mistaken. A work that the author did not create for the stage will not fit on it, and no matter how much you fight with it, there will still be something alien in it, something that resists the stage...”
Goethe especially emphasized the word “fatal.”
encyclopedic Dictionary winged words and expressions Serov Vadim Vasilievich
Words should be cramped, but thoughts should be spacious
Words should be cramped, but thoughts should be spacious
The primary source is the poem “Form. Imitation of Schiller" (1879) N. A. Nekrasova(1821-1877):
Follow the rule stubbornly:
So that words are cramped,
There is room for thoughts.
It is usually cited as the basic rule of oratory - to say a lot in a few words.
It is also used in a humorous form as advice to be brief and to the point.
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