Etty Hillesum Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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
Life may be brimming over with experiences, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And 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
Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

Etty Hillesum
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.

Etty Hillesum
I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.

Etty Hillesum
We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.

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
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
Most people write off their longing for friends and family as so many losses in their lives, when they should count the fact that their heart is able to long so hard and to love so much as among their greatest blessings.

Etty Hillesum
A desire to kneel down sometimes pulses through my body, or rather it is as if my body had been meant and made for the act of kneeling. Sometimes, in moments of deep gratitude, kneeling down becomes an overwhelming urge, head deeply bowed, hands before my face.

Etty Hillesum
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
Thinking gets you nowhere. It may be a fine and noble aid in academic studies, but you can't think your way out of emotional difficulties. That takes something altogether different. You have to make yourself passive then, and just listen. Re-establish contact with a slice of eternity.

Etty Hillesum
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.

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

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
The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.

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
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.

Etty Hillesum
A large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. What distinguished each of us was only our inner attitude.

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
To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse — that's quite a task.

Etty Hillesum
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
One must marry one's feelings to one's beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one's life.

Etty Hillesum
How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.

Etty Hillesum