Dag Hammarskjöld

Dag Hammarskjöld

(July 29, 1905 - September 18, 1961) Swedish diplomat, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

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

• Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• For all that has been: thanks. For all that will be: yes.

• 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 again made clean.
  • Variant: 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.

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

• 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.

• He who has surrendered himself to it knows that the Way ends on the Cross— even when it is leading him through the jubilation of Gennesaret or the triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

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

• 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.

• I never discuss discussions.

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

• In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

• Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible— not to have run away.
  • Variant: Life demands from you only the strength you posses. One feat is possible— not to have run away.

• 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.

• 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 his right road.

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

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

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

• 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?

• The longest journey of any person is the journey inward.
  • Variant:' The longest journey is the journey inward.
  • Variant: 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.

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

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• Time goes by, reputation increases, ability declines.

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

• 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.

• You are... the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does.

• 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.

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