Quotes from Dag Hammarskjold

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

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

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.

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

Each day the first day: Each day a life.

On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted.

Do not seek death. Death will find you.

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

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 convictions.

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.

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.

Do not look back and do not dream about the future. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward, your destiny, is in the present moment

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.

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

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.

Time goes by, reputation increases, ability declines.

Perhaps a great love is never returned.

Here man is no longer the center of the world, only a witness, but a witness who is also a partner in the silent life of Nature, bound by secret affinities of the trees.

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 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.

The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.

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