Etty Hillesum Quotes

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

— Etty Hillesum

“Become simple and live simply, not only within yourself but also in your everyday dealings. Don't make ripples all around you, don't try to be interesting, keep your distance, be honest, fight the desire to be thought fascinating by the outside world.”

— 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

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

— Etty Hillesum

“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

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.

— 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 know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream ... and life continues ...”

— 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

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

“We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.”

— Etty Hillesum

“One must also accept that one has 'uncreative' moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.”

— 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

“It is sheer hell in this house. I would have to be quite a writer to describe it properly. Anyhow, I sprang from the chaos and it is my business to pull myself out of it.”

— Etty Hillesum

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

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

— Etty Hillesum

“By 'coming to terms with life' I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.”

— Etty Hillesum

“We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. We make mental provisions for the days to come, and everything turns out differently, quite differently. Sufficient unto the day. The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries.”

— Etty Hillesum

“We human beings cause monstrous conditions, but precisely because we cause them we soon learn to adapt ourselves to them. Only if we become such that we can no longer adapt ourselves, only if, deep inside, we rebel against every kind of evil, will we be able to put a stop to it ... while everything within us does not yet scream out in protest, so long will we find ways of adapting ourselves, and the horrors will continue.”

— 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

“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

“We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”

— Etty Hillesum

Ought we not, from time to time, open ourselves up to cosmic sadness? ... Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate. But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge-from which new sorrows will be born for others-then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply.

— 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

“I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.”

— 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

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

“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

When I pray, I never pray for myself, always for others, or else I hold a silly, naive, or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for the sake of convenience I call God. Praying to God for something for yourself strikes me as being too childish for words. To pray for another's well-being is something I find childish as well; one should only pray that another should have enough strength to shoulder his burden. If you do that, you lend him some of your own strength.

— Etty Hillesum

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

— Etty Hillesum

If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.

— 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

“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

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

— 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

I'm afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.

— Etty Hillesum

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

— 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

“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

“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 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

“I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.”

— 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

The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

— 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

That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything.

— Etty Hillesum

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

— Etty Hillesum

Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won't work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.

— 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