-
Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.
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
-
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 -
Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that's not too awful either, but never, never give up.
Etty Hillesum -
All disasters stem from us. Why is there a war? Perhaps because now and then I might be inclined to snap at my neighbour. Because I and my neighbour and everyone else do not have enough love. Yet we could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing each day, the love which is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live.
Etty Hillesum -
Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across the cornfields--there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze--and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and the now, that I must find them.
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
-
We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.
Etty Hillesum -
A desire to kneel down sometimes pulses through my body, or rather it is as if my body has 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
If one burdens the future with one's worries, it cannot grow organically. I am filled with confidence, not that I shall succeed in worldly things, but that even when things go badly for me I shall still find life good and worth living.
Etty Hillesum
-
I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.
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 -
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 -
Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
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 -
Before, I always lived in anticipation . . . that it was all a preparation for something else, something "greater," more "genuine." But that feeling has dropped away from me completely. I live here and now, this minute, this day, to the full, and the life is worth living.
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 -
That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything.
Etty Hillesum -
I keep remembering from my early student days how I would walk at night through the streets, my hands bunched into fists in the pocket of my coat, my head hunched deep into my collar, and how I used to say, 'I want to work, I shall work'--and then I would come back home and be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.
Etty Hillesum -
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.
Etty Hillesum