Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.
ETTY HILLESUMGreed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.
More Etty Hillesum Quotes
-
-
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
ETTY HILLESUM -
I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Sometimes my day is crammed full of people and talk and yet I have the feeling of living in utter peace and quiet. And the tree outside my window, in the evenings, is a greater experience than all those people put together.
ETTY HILLESUM -
To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore the external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse, that’s quite a task.
ETTY HILLESUM -
The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Our desire must be like a slow and stately ship, sailing across endless oceans, never in search of safe anchorage. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it will find mooring for a moment.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.
ETTY HILLESUM -
If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
That I should die next week, I would still be able to sit at my desk all week and study with perfect equanimity, for I know now that life and death make a meaningful whole.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won’t work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.
ETTY HILLESUM -
We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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 HILLESUM -
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Every day I shall put my papers in order and every day I shall say farewell. And the real farewell, when it comes, will only be a small outward confirmation of what has been accomplished within me from day to day.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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.
ETTY HILLESUM -
The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
ETTY HILLESUM