Quotes By Dag Hammarskjold

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Time goes by, reputation increases, ability declines.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

It is when we all play 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.