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 HILLESUMDespite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
More Etty Hillesum Quotes
-
-
I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
ETTY HILLESUM -
I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
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 -
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 -
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 -
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
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 -
How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.
ETTY HILLESUM -
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 -
After 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 HILLESUM -
I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that’s not too awful either, but never, never give up.
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 -
Suffering has always been with us; does it really matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.
ETTY HILLESUM -
Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
ETTY HILLESUM