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.
ETTY HILLESUMRelated Topics
Anand Thakur
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.
ETTY HILLESUM
Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.
ETTY HILLESUM
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 HILLESUM
How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.
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
The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
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
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
One must also accept that one has ‘uncreative’ moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.
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
Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.
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
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
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
We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.
ETTY HILLESUM
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