Dag Hammarskjold Quotes (55 Quotes)

Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.

The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.

Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.

Maturity - among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.

A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.

What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.

Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

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

Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.

Friendship needs no wordsit is a loneliness relieved of the anguish of loneliness.

The longest journey of any person is the journey inward.

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return.

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

If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.

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.

When the morning's freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles give under the strain, the climb seems endless, and suddenly nothing will go quite as you wish-it is then that you must not hesitate.

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

The breaking wave and the muscle as it contracts obey the same law. Delicate line gathers the body's total strength in a bold balance. Shall my soul meet so severe a curve, journeying on its way to form?

So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning. I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content No, no, no but refreshed, rested while waiting.

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.

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

I never discuss discussions.

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.

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

To forgive oneself? No, that doesn't work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.

Life demands from you only the strength you posses. One feat is possible -- not to have run away.

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your convictions.

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

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy.

Time goes by, reputation increases, ability declines.

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.

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.

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

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 - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

It is a little bit humiliating when I have to say that Chou En-lai to me appears as the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign politics. so much more dangerous than you imagine because he is so much better a man than you have ever admitted.

Time always seems long to the child who is waiting - for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.

The myths have always condemned those who "looked back." Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.