Etty Hillesum Quotes

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.

Everyone has monsters and demons within themselves. They're metaphors for the human condition.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

Every soul is a battlefield.

Is the human condition not defined by an endless struggle to control the ego's subterfuges?

In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.

It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable--when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us--that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.

When you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

We're fighting internal struggles, I am the cancer for my own cure.

there’s really nowhere else I can go, and even if there were, it wouldn’t make a difference because I’d just be running from myself, and you can’t do that no matter how hard you try, and trying hard is what got you in this predicament in the first place.

and I try to draw the line but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time.

It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.

People are running, running, but there is no place in the world to which they can flee to escape themselves. Ultimately, each one must face himself.

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

That external struggle mirrors the struggle of this life force of energy that [princess Margaret] was.

Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

I have not so great a struggle with my vices, great and numerous as they are, as I have with my impatience. My efforts are not absolutely useless; yet I have never been able to conquer this ferocious wild beast.

Everybody has a story... and a scream.

There's always going to be a war going on inside of me. That's just, I think, my make-up.

I've had times in my life when I really haven't been able to figure myself out.