Etty Hillesum Short Quotes

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

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

Etty Hillesum
Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.

Etty Hillesum
We are always in search of the redeeming formula, the crystallizing thought.

Etty Hillesum
That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything. Keeps you from reality.

Etty Hillesum
Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

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

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

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

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
Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that's not too awful either, but never, never give up.

Etty Hillesum
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
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
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
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.

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
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
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
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
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
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
But I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply moulding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.

Etty Hillesum
So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful.

Etty Hillesum
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
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