Top 50 Etty Hillesum Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.”

— Etty Hillesum

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

— Etty Hillesum

5. “Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”

— Etty Hillesum

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

— Etty Hillesum

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Etty Hillesum

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that’s not too awful either, but never, never give up.”

— Etty Hillesum

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

— Etty Hillesum

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “What matters is not to allow my whole life to be dominated by what is going on inside me. That has to be kept subordinate one way or another. What I mean is: one must not let oneself be completely disabled by just one thing, however bad; don’t let it impede the great stream of life that flows through you. I have the feeling of something secret deep inside me that no one knows about.”

— Etty Hillesum

26. “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

27. “I believe that I know and share the many sorrows and sad circumstances that a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them, I do not prolong such moments of agony. They pass through me, like life itself, as a broad, eternal stream, they become part of that stream, and life continues. And as a result all my strength is preserved, does not become tagged onto futile sorrow or rebelliousness.”

— Etty Hillesum

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Etty Hillesum

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “We go too far in fearing for our unhappy bodies, but our forgotten spirit shrivels up in some corner. Our lives are going wrong, we conduct ourselves without dignity. We lack historical sense, forget that even those about to perish are part of history. I hate nobody. I am not embittered. And once the love of mankind has germinated in you, it will grow without measure.”

— Etty Hillesum

35. “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

36. “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

37. “I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.”

— Etty Hillesum

38. “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

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

— Etty Hillesum

40. “I know that those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place.”

— Etty Hillesum

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

— Etty Hillesum

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

— Etty Hillesum

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

— Etty Hillesum

44. “Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.”

— Etty Hillesum

45. “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

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

— Etty Hillesum

47. “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

48. “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

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

— Etty Hillesum

50. “I can’t really put it into words; in any case I am not yet as honest with myself as I should be and it is always hard to get to the bottom of things with words.”

— Etty Hillesum