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 HILLESUMLife is good, after all…and that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland.
More Etty Hillesum Quotes
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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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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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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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The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
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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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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.
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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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I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.
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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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We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
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Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
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I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.
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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.
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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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