“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…”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like …" by Etty Hillesum?
Etty Hillesum photo
Etty Hillesum 28
Jewish diarist 1914–1943

Related quotes

Sallust photo

“Yet many human beings, resigned to sensuality and indolence, un-instructed and unimproved, have passed through life like travellers in a strange country.”
Sed multi mortales dediti ventri atque somno, indocti incultique vitam sicuti peregrinantes transiere.

Sallust (-86–-34 BC) Roman historian, politician

Source: Bellum Catilinae (c. 44 BC), Chapter II

Henry Drummond photo
William Penn photo

“I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow human being let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

This quote is often attributed to William Penn, but there are no records of it before the 19th century, and its actual source seems to have most likely been another prominent Quaker, Stephen Grellet.
Misattributed

Maddox photo
Kuruvilla Pandikattu photo
Ursula Goodenough photo

“I am convinced that the project can be undertaken only if we all experience a solemn gratitude that we exist at all, share a reverence for how life works, and acknowledge a deep and complex imperative that life continue.”

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. xvi
Context: Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview — a culture-independent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are. From my perspective, this part is easy. How things are is, well, how things are; our scientific account of Nature, an account that can be called the Epic of Evolution… This is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true.
If religious emotions can be elicited by natural reality — and I believe that they can — then the story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos that we need to articulate. I will not presume to suggest what this ethos might look like. Its articulation must be a global project. But I am convinced that the project can be undertaken only if we all experience a solemn gratitude that we exist at all, share a reverence for how life works, and acknowledge a deep and complex imperative that life continue.

“The stream of life is maintained only in continuous flow of matter through all groups of organisms.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1950s, Problems of Life (1952, 1960), p. 52)

Albert Camus photo
Epictetus photo

“For I am not Eternity, but a human being—a part of the whole, as an hour is part of the day. I must come like the hour, and like the hour must pass!”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: It is hard to combine and unite these two qualities, the carefulness of one who is affected by circumstances, and the intrepidity of one who heeds them not. But it is not impossible: else were happiness also impossible. We should act as we do in seafaring: “What can I do?”—Choose the master, the crew, the day, the opportunity. Then comes a sudden storm. What matters it to me? my part has been fully done. The matter is in the hands of another—the Master of the ship. The ship is foundering. What then have I to do? I do the only thing that remains to me—to be drowned without fear, without a cry, without upbraiding God, but knowing that what has been born must likewise perish. For I am not Eternity, but a human being—a part of the whole, as an hour is part of the day. I must come like the hour, and like the hour must pass! (186).

Jane Ellen Harrison photo

“Women qua women may remain, for the better continuance of life, subject to men; women as human beings demand to live as well as to continue life. To live effectively they must learn to know the world through and through, in order that, while side by side with men, they may fashion life to their common good.”

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) British classical scholar, linguist and feminist

"Homo Sum." Being a Letter to an Anti-Suffragist from an Anthropologist, 1900, p. 30 https://archive.org/details/homosumbeinglett00harruoft/page/30

Related topics