Book detail: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943 is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
Etty Hillesum's letters and diaries offer a profound and intimate look into the life of a young woman during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The volume provides a detailed account of her personal journey, reflections on human nature, and her deepening spiritual beliefs amidst the horrors of the Holocaust.
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“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“And I believe that I will never be able to hate any human being for his so-called 'wickedness,' that I shall only hate the evil that is within me, though hate is perhaps putting it too strongly even then. In any case, we cannot be lax enough in what we demand of others and strict enough in what we demand of ourselves.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“One must also accept that one has 'uncreative' moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
“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.”
Source: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943