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 HILLESUMEvery 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.
More Etty Hillesum Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.
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We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
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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
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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.
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Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
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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.
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I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
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One must also accept that one has ‘uncreative’ moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.
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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.
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How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that’s not too awful either, but never, never give up.
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I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
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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.
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If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.
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Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.
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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.
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