I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
ETTY HILLESUMRelated Topics
Anand Thakur
I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
ETTY HILLESUM
We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.
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
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 think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
ETTY HILLESUM
We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
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
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
That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything.
ETTY HILLESUM
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
I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.
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
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.
ETTY HILLESUM
The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
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
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.
ETTY HILLESUM