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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

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Thinking Gets You Nowhere.

Etty Hillesum

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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.

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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.

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.

We Have To Fight Them Daily, Lake Fleas, Those Many Small Worries About The Morrow, For They Sap Our Energies.

If One Finds The Strength To Deal With Small Things, One Finds It To Deal With The Large Ones As Well.

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

I Would Be So Exhausted By My Determination That I Had No Strength Left To Do The Actual Work.

One Must Also Accept That One Has 'uncreative' Moments. The More Honestly One Can Accept That, The Quicker These Moments Will Pass.

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.

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.

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.

Overwhelming Urge

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.

Here, Beside This Great Black Surface That Is My Desk, I Feel As Though I Am On A Desert Island.

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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.

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.

Despite Everything, Life Is Full Of Beauty And Meaning.

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.

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Never Give Up, Never Escape, Take Everything In, And Perhaps Suffer, That's Not Too Awful Either, But Never, Never Give Up.

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Unexpected Gifts

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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.

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.

Each Of Us Must Turn Inward And Destroy In Himself All That He Thinks He Ought To Destroy In Others.

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.

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.

That Fear Of Missing Out On Things Makes You Miss Out On Everything.

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.

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.

Greed Probably Figures In My Intellectual Life As Well, As I Attempt To Absorb A Massive Amount Of Information With Consequent Mental Indigestion.

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.

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