Quotes from 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 toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world." -Etty Hillesum Journals, Amsterdam, 1941

Oh, Lord, let me feel at one with myself. Let me perform a thousand daily tasks with love, but let every one spring from a greater central core of devotion and love.

One should accept things as they are and not try to lift them to impossible heights; only if you let them be will they reveal their true worth.

That is your disease: you want to capture life in formulas of your own. You want to embrace all aspects of life with your intellect instead of allowing yourself to be embraced by life. You want to create the world all over again each time, instead of enjoying it as it is.

Oh God, I thank You for having created me as I am. I thank You for the sense of fulfillment I sometimes have; that fulfillment is after all nothing but being filled with You. I promise You to strive my whole life long for beauty and harmony and also humility and true love, whispers of which I hear inside me during my best moments.

What is primitive in me is my warmth; I have a sort of primitive love and primitive sympathy for people, for all people.

I myself am made up of so many people.

I know the intimate gestures he uses with women, but I still want to know the gestures he uses with God.

I never worry about tomorrow. For instance I know I am going to have to leave here very soon, and I haven't the faintest idea where I'll end up or how I shall earn my living, but I know that something will turn up. 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.

So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn one's innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view. So that something of 'God' can enter you, and something of 'Love', too.

I for one have ceased to cling to life and to things; I have the feeling that everything is accidental, that one must break one's inner bonds with people and stand aside for all else.

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.

Lord, give me wisdom, not knowledge. Or rather the knowledge that leads to wisdom and true happiness and not the kind that leads to power.

Ces choses là ne se racontent pas, on ne peut que les subir (308)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

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.

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

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

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