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 HILLESUMRelated Topics
Anand Thakur
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
We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.
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
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
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
We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
ETTY HILLESUM
I know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream…and life continues.
ETTY HILLESUM
Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.
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
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
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
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
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
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
The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
ETTY HILLESUM
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
ETTY HILLESUM