Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by Dag Hammarskjold

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?

Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I never discuss discussions.

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.

Time goes by, reputation increases, ability declines.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds

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

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.

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.

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

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

Forgiving is forgetting, in spite of remembering.

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.

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