Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
ETTY HILLESUMI think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
More Etty Hillesum Quotes
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There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze.
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I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
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Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.
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Life is good, after all…and that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland.
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Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.
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Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.
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I don’t think I have nerves of steel, far from it, but I can certainly stand up to things. I am not afraid to look suffering straight in the eyes.
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How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.
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We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.
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The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.
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The fact is I don’t lead a simple enough inner life. I indulge in excesses, bacchanalia of the spirit. Perhaps I identify too much with everything I read and study. Someone like Dostoevsky still shatters me.
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Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
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I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.
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Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.
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Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that’s not too awful either, but never, never give up.
ETTY HILLESUM