Quotes from Dag Hammarskjold

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

Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Every deed and every relationship is surrounded by an atmosphere of silence. Friendship needs no words -- it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only those who keep their eye fixed on the far horizon will find their right road.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 again made clean.

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.

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.

You have never done enough, so long as it is still possible that you have something of value to contribute