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 HILLESUMEvery word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.
More Etty Hillesum Quotes
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I don’t think I have nerves of steel, far from it, but I can certainly stand up to things. I am not afraid to look suffering straight in the eyes.
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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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Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
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Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.
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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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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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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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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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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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How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.
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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.
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The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.
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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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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 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