Dag Hammarskjold Quotations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 Assembly has witnessed over the last weeks how historical truth is established; once an allegation has been repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

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

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity

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.

Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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." page 58 The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them." page 62

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I believe that we should die with decency so that at least decency will survive.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

has no impact on most of the people outside the General Assembly and this building.

'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.

For all that has been, Thank you. For all that is to come, Yes!

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.

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.

Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back. It must be held out empty - for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.

We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.

Here man is no longer the center of the world, only a witness, but a witness who is also a partner in the silent life of Nature, bound by secret affinities of the trees.

Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines.

Friendship needs no words.

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.

What you must dare: is to be yourself.

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.

Forgiving is forgetting, in spite of remembering.

Do not look back and do not dream about the future. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward, your destiny, is in the present moment

It is more important to understand the ground of your own behavior than to understand the motives of another.

In the presence of God, nothing stands between Him and us - we are forgiven. But we cannot feel His presence if anything is allowed to stand between ourselves and others.

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

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

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

The UN wasn't created to take mankind into paradise, but rather, to save humanity from hell.

It was when Lucifer first congratulated himself upon his angelic behavior that he became the tool of evil.

Only one feat is possible: not to have run away.

Setbacks in trying to realize the ideal do not prove that the ideal is at fault.

For all that has been, Thanks. To all that shall be, Yes.

The longest journey is the journey inward.

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

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.

We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.

Perhaps a great love is never returned.

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

Do not seek death. Death will find you,

Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but only soldiers can do it.

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.

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.

Respect for the word - to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth - is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.

The concept of loyalty is distorted when it is understood to mean blind acceptance. It is correctly interpreted when it is assumed to cover honest criticism.

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

To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement.

Life yields only to the conqueror.

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

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

You take the pen, and the lines dance. You take the flute and the notes shimmer. You take the brush, and the colors sing. So all things have meaning and beauty in that space beyond time where you are. How, then, can I hold back anything from you?

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

For the sacrificed, in the hour of sacrifice, only one thing counts: faith-alone among enemies and skeptics. Faith, in spite of the humiliation which is both the necessary precondition and the consequence of faith, faith without any hope of compensation other than he can find in a faith which reality seems so thoroughly to refute.

At some moment I did answer "Yes" to someone or something. And from that hour on I was certain that existence is meaningful.

Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.

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.

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.

Never let success hide its emptiness from you, achievement its nothingness, toil its desolation. And so...keep alive the incentive to push on further, that pain in the soul which drives us beyond ourselves...Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward - your destiny - are here and now.

In a political context of the utmost significance, ["freedom from fear"] recognizes a human right which, in a broad sense, may be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

The big, shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant non-Communists with hail and thunder.

You dare your Yes - and experience a meaning...You repeat your Yes - and all things acquire a meaning...When everything has a meaning, how can you live anything but a YES.

Destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided.