Top 100 Hammarskjold Quotes
#1. So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live, or die, in vain. Let us call a truce to terror. Let us invoke the blessings of peace. And, as we build an international capacity to keep peace, let us join in dismantling the national capacity to wage war.
John F. Kennedy
#2. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#3. We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
Dag Hammarskjold
#4. On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted.
Dag Hammarskjold
#6. 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?
Dag Hammarskjold
#7. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#8. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#9. Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.
Dag Hammarskjold
#10. Is my contact with others anything more than a contact with reflections? Who or what can give me the power to transform the mirror into a doorway?
Dag Hammarskjold
#11. A human intimacy
free from the earth but blessing the earth.
Dag Hammarskjold
#12. Setbacks in trying to realize the ideal do not prove that the ideal is at fault.
Dag Hammarskjold
#14. The UN wasn't created to take mankind into paradise, but rather, to save humanity from hell.
Dag Hammarskjold
#15. The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.
Dag Hammarskjold
#16. Trees quiver in the wind,
sailing on a sea of mist
out of earshot.
Dag Hammarskjold
#17. Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
Dag Hammarskjold
#18. To preserve the silence within
amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens
no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.
Dag Hammarskjold
#19. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#20. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#22. Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.
Dag Hammarskjold
#23. It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity
Dag Hammarskjold
#24. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#26. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#28. It was when Lucifer first congratulated himself upon his angelic behavior that he became the tool of evil.
Dag Hammarskjold
#29. Smiling, sincere, incorruptible -
His body disciplined and limber.
A man who had become what he could,
And was what he was-
Ready at any moment to gather everything
Into one simple sacrifice.
Dag Hammarskjold
#30. The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
Dag Hammarskjold
#31. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#32. The big, shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant non-Communists with hail and thunder.
Dag Hammarskjold
#33. In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.
Dag Hammarskjold
#34. 'Freedom from fear' could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.
Dag Hammarskjold
#36. 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
Dag Hammarskjold
#37. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#38. Humility before the flower at the timber line is the gate which gives access to the path up the open fell.
Dag Hammarskjold
#39. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#40. When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.
Dag Hammarskjold
#41. I am the vessel. The draft is God's. And God is the thirsty one.
Dag Hammarskjold
#42. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#43. Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Dag Hammarskjold
#45. Apes. The moon woke them
round the world's navel revolved
prayer wheels of steps.
Dag Hammarskjold
#46. The devils enter uninvited when the house stands empty. For other kinds of guests, you have to first open the door.
Dag Hammarskjold
#47. My home drove me
into the wilderness.
Few look for me. Few hear me.
Dag Hammarskjold
#48. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#49. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#50. For all that has been,
Thank you.
For all that is to come,
Yes!
Dag Hammarskjold
#52. We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.
Dag Hammarskjold
#54. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#56. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#58. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#59. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#60. The 'great' commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one.
Dag Hammarskjold
#61. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#62. This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself I. I ask: what am I doing here? And, at once, this I becomes unreal.
Dag Hammarskjold
#63. Acts of violence
Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death
and the meaninglessness of killing.
Dag Hammarskjold
#64. Destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided.
Dag Hammarskjold
#65. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#66. The Universal Declaration ... as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations ... it not only crystallizes the political thought of our times on these matters, but it has also influenced the thinking of legislators all over the world.
Dag Hammarskjold
#67. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#68. It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - from lack of character.
Dag Hammarskjold
#69. Too tired for company,
You seek a solitude
You are too tired to fill.
Dag Hammarskjold
#70. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#72. It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.
Dag Hammarskjold
#73. Somebody placed the shuttle in your hand: somebody who had already arranged the threads.
Dag Hammarskjold
#74. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#75. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#76. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.
Dag Hammarskjold
#77. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#78. It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. That is why you are faithful to it, even while you stand waiting, so long as you are prepared, and act the moment you are confronted by its demands.
Dag Hammarskjold
#79. Didst thou give me this inescapable loneliness so that it would be easier for me to give thee all?
Dag Hammarskjold
#80. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#81. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#82. He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.
Dag Hammarskjold
#83. Isn't the fulfillment of our duty towards our neighbor an expression of deepest desire?
Dag Hammarskjold
#84. It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals
though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt
but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I
in complacent adjustment to alien demands.
Dag Hammarskjold
#86. The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.
Dag Hammarskjold
#87. If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.
Dag Hammarskjold
#89. Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.
Dag Hammarskjold
#90. The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.
Dag Hammarskjold
#91. That our pains and longings are thousandfold and can be anesthetized in a thousand different ways is as commonplace a truth as that, in the end, they are all one, and can only be overcome in one way. What you most need is to feel ...
Dag Hammarskjold
#92. I believe that we should die with decency so that at least decency will survive.
Dag Hammarskjold
#93. Unless there is a spiritual renaissance, the world will know no peace.
Dag Hammarskjold
#94. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#95. Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
Dag Hammarskjold
#96. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#97. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
#98. 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?
Dag Hammarskjold
#99. His moral lecture
blazed with hate.
What could have driven a child that far?
Dag Hammarskjold
#100. 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.
Dag Hammarskjold
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