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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.

Etty Hillesum

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

Born Necessary Word
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

Anand Thakur
I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
ETTY HILLESUM

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

Anand Thakur
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
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

Anand Thakur
We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
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 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

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
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
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.
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
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.
ETTY HILLESUM

Anand Thakur
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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