Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.
ETTY HILLESUMI don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.
More Etty Hillesum Quotes
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I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.
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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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If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.
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It is the only thing we can do. Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate that we add to this world makes it sill more inhospitable
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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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And now that I don’t want to own anything any more and am free, now I suddenly own everything, now my inner riches are immeasurable.
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I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.
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I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
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The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.
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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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If one burdens the future with one’s worries, it cannot grow organically. I am filled with confidence, not that I shall succeed in worldly things, but that even when things go badly for me I shall still find life good and worth living.
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The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
ETTY HILLESUM