Etty Hillesum Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“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

#Appreciation #Prayer #Yoga
“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 be in our troubled world.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Peace #World #Moral
“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

#Gratitude #Hands #Desire
“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

#Meaningful #Acceptance #Life And Death
“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

#Emotional #Thinking #Way
“We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Should #Willing #Wounds
“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

#Determination #Giving Up #Sparks
“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

#Peace #Believe #Roots
“One must also accept that one has 'uncreative' moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Moments #Accepting #Honestly
“I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding oneâ€™s inner life. And that too is a deed.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Believe #Writing #Creativity
“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

#Love #Real #Farewell
“Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Life Is
“Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that's not too awful either, but never, never give up.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Giving Up #Suffering #Awful
“We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Fighting #Lakes #Worry
“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

#Reality #Tasks #Sake
“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

#People #Tree #Feelings
“How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Destiny #Men #Shapes
“Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Thinking #Inward #Turns
“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

#Simple #Excess #Too Much
“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

#Revenge #Grief #Sadness
“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

#Want #Riches
“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

#Silence #Gestures #Sometimes
“Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Writing #Born
“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

#Greed #Intellectual #Information
“Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it all mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations that strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Men #People #Important
“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

#Wall #Views #Cells
“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

#Sorrow #Share #Broads
“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

#Peace #Attitude #Men
“As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.”
-- Etty Hillesum

#Gratitude #Expectations #Unexpected
“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

#Inspirational #Running #Struggle

Top 50 Etty Hillesum Quotes 2021 Update Quotefancy

Top 25 Quotes By Etty Hillesum Of 60 A Z Quotes

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