Daily Inspiration Quote by Etty Hillesum

“I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength” turns the usual story about exhaustion inside out. Hillesum isn’t talking about running out of energy; she’s talking about the anxious self-management that makes people hoard it. The real drain, in her view, is the tight-fisted calculation: Will this effort matter? Will it be appreciated? What if I spend myself and nothing changes? That fear doesn’t conserve power; it corrodes it, shrinking a life down to risk-avoidance.

The line’s quiet provocation is moral as much as psychological. Strength here isn’t merely stamina or willpower; it’s the capacity to show up fully, to act without guarantees. Hillesum implies that strength behaves less like a battery than a muscle: it grows through use, through choosing engagement over self-protective hesitation. The subtext is almost accusatory to modern sensibilities that treat energy like a precious resource to optimize. She’s warning that the obsession with “not wasting” yourself can become an elegant excuse for withholding yourself.

Context makes the sentence hit harder. Hillesum was a Dutch Jewish diarist writing under Nazi occupation, later murdered at Auschwitz. Against that backdrop, “wasting strength” sounds like the cruelest illusion: history can erase the outcomes, not the act. Her intent isn’t motivational cheerleading; it’s a defiant ethic. Spend your strength anyway, not because it will win, but because refusing to live from fear is its own form of resistance.