Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Journeys, Achievement, Perseverance, Possibilities
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
Topics: Respect, Respectability, Spirituality
In life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddied? You are the one who must grow up.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Forethought, Foresight, Gratitude, Acceptance, Attitude, Hedonism, Self-Pity, Self-reliance, Blessings, Vision
It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Security, Safety, Risk
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.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Time goes by, reputation increases, ability declines.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Reputation
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 its simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Wilderness
Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
—Dag Hammarskjold
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.
—Dag Hammarskjold
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
Topics: Forgiveness
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.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Integrity
The longest journey of any person is the journey inward.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Never, “for the sake of peace and quiet,” deny your own experience and convictions.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Conviction, Peace
The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: The Present
Only one feat is possible: not to have run away.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Courage
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
Topics: Prayer
Friendship needs no words…
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Friends and Friendship
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
Topics: Work
The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Confidence, Self-talk
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.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Goals, Vision, Appropriateness, Aptness, Aspirations, Challenges
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
Topics: Dying, Death
Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Loneliness, Purpose
Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I -.
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Death
The great commitment is so much easier than the ordinary, everyday one—and can all too easily shut our hearts to the latter. A willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice can be associated with, and even produce, a great hardness of heart. You thought you were indifferent to praise for achievements which you would not yourself have counted to your credit, or that, if you should be tempted to feel flattered, you would always remember that the praise far exceeded what the events justified. You thought yourself indifferent—until you felt your jealousy flare up at his naive attempts to make himself important, and your self-conceit stood exposed. Concerning the hardness of the heart—and its littleness—let me read with open eyes the book my days are writing, and learn.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Praise
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
Topics: Maturity
The UN is not just a product of do-gooders. It is harshly real. The day will come when men will see the U.N. and what it means clearly. 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
Topics: Nationalism, Nation, Nationality
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Destiny, Decisions
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 this 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.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Wilderness
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.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Peace
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.
—Dag Hammarskjold
Topics: Dedication, Commitment, Decisions, Simplicity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- George Marshall American General
- Henry Kissinger American Diplomat
- Martin Luther King, Jr. American Civil Rights Leader
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Charles G. Dawes American Diplomat, Politician
- Javier Perez de Cuellar Peruvian Diplomat, Politician
- Adlai Stevenson American Diplomat
- George F. Kennan American Diplomat, Historian
- John Foster Dulles American Politician
- Florence Nightingale English Nurse
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