Etty Hillesum Quotes - Page 3

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.

We have to fight them daily, lake 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.

I'm afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.

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.

Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

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.

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

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

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