I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
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Anand Thakur
I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
ETTY HILLESUMSometimes 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 HILLESUMLife 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 HILLESUMThe more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
ETTY HILLESUMEach of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
ETTY HILLESUMSometimes 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 HILLESUMEvery word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.
ETTY HILLESUMThat 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 HILLESUMThat fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything.
ETTY HILLESUMI 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 HILLESUMEverything 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 HILLESUMHow rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.
ETTY HILLESUMSometimes 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 HILLESUMAfter each creative act one has to be sustained by one’s strength of character, by a moral sense, by I don’t know what, lest one tumble.
ETTY HILLESUMSometimes 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 HILLESUMWe have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
ETTY HILLESUM