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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.

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

Anand Thakur
I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
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

Anand Thakur
Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that’s not too awful either, but never, never give up.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
Such words as ‘God’ and ‘Death’ and ‘Suffering’ and ‘Eternity’ are best forgotten. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
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

Anand Thakur
I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.
ETTY HILLESUM

Born Necessary Word
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.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
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

Believe Chance Convince Live Myself
I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
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

Anand Thakur
How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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