Dag Hammarskjold Quotes

The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.

Be grateful as your deeds become less and less associated with your name, as your feet ever more lightly tread the earth.

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is ? is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.

Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just.

Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.

Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.

Your body must become familiar with its death - in all its possible forms and degrees - as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.

I don't know Who, or what, put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something,and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

'Freedom from fear' could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

The longest journey is the journey inward.

Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.

When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.

Unless there is a spiritual renaissance, the world will know no peace.

It is playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.

The world cannot live at peace without the United Nations. For this reason: it creates a reasonable guarantee that all this change in the world, these tremendous political and economic developments, can be channelized, kept orderly. The United Nations is a mold that keeps the hot metal from spilling over.

Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.

The devils enter uninvited when the house stands empty. For other kinds of guests, you have to first open the door.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

Beneath the hush a whisper from long ago, promising peace of mind and a burden shared. No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled.

Destiny is something not be to desired and not to be avoided. A mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

Friendship needs no words.

The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped me in their peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the wonder: that *I* exist.

I have only my own burden to bear.

Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.

It is not the Soviet Union or indeed any other big Powers who need the United Nations for their protection. It is all the others. In this sense, the Organization is first of all their Organization and I deeply believe in the wisdom with which they will be able to use it and guide it. I shall remain in my post during the term of my office as a servant of the Organization in the interests of all those other nations, as long as they wish me to do so.

On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted.

The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.

Isn't the fulfillment of our duty towards our neighbor an expression of deepest desire?

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - from lack of character.

Fatigue dulls the pain, but awakes enticing thoughts of death. So! that is the way in which you are tempted to overcome your loneliness -- by making the ultimate escape from life. -- No! It may be that death is to be your ultimate gift to life: it must not be an act of treachery against it.

If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.

Life yields only to the conqueror.

I am the vessel. The draft is God's. And God is the thirsty one.

The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned.

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.

The longest journey
Is the journey inwards.
Of him who has chosen his destiny,
Who has started upon his quest
For the source of his being.

Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

The 'great' commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one.

Like wind-- In it, with it, of it. Of it just like a sail, so light and strong that, even when it is bent flat, it gathers all the power of the wind without hampering its course. Like light-- In light, lit through by light, transformed into light. Like the lens which disappears in the light it focuses. Like wind. Like light. Just this--on these expanses, on these heights.

We've got to learn hard things in our lifetime, but it's love that gives you the strength. It's being nice to people and having a lot of fun and laughing harder than anything, hopefully every single day of your life.

You wake from dreams of doom and--for a moment--you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love's calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.

Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who 'forgives' you--out of love--takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice. The price you must pay for your own liberation through another's sacrifice is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.

Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.

Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us.