Quotes by Dag Hammarskjold

About Dag Hammarskjold:

Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld is the youngest to have held the post. He is one of only three people to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize. Hammarskjöld is the only UN Secretary-General to die in office; his death occurred en route to cease-fire negotiations. US President John F. Kennedy called Hammarskjöld "the greatest statesman of our century".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Dag Hammarskjold

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

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

When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become ...

Dag Hammarskjold

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and...

Dag Hammarskjold

Doffing the ego's safe glory, he finds his naked reality.

Dag Hammarskjold

This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself I. I ask: what am I doing here? And, at once, this I becomes unreal.

Dag Hammarskjold

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 everythi...

Dag Hammarskjold

Trees quiver in the wind, sailing on a sea of mist out of earshot.

Dag Hammarskjold

His moral lecture blazed with hate. What could have driven a child that far?

Dag Hammarskjold

Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who 'forgives' you--out of love--takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice. The price you must pay for your own liberation throug...

Dag Hammarskjold

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

Better than other people.' Sometimes he says: 'That, at least, you are.' But more often: 'Why should you be? Either you are what you can be, or you are not - like other people.

Dag Hammarskjold

My home drove me into the wilderness. Few look for me. Few hear me.

Dag Hammarskjold

Apes. The moon woke them-- round the world's navel revolved prayer wheels of steps.

Dag Hammarskjold

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point ...

Dag Hammarskjold

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*...

Dag Hammarskjold

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one--which you will ...

Dag Hammarskjold

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to c...

Dag Hammarskjold

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 compla...

Dag Hammarskjold

Author Bio

  • NameDag Hammarskjold
  • DescriptionSwedish diplomat, economist, and author
  • AliasesDag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld
  • BornJuly 29, 1905
  • DiedSeptember 18, 1961
  • CountrySweden
  • ProfessionPolitician; Diplomat; Economist; Poet; Writer
  • AwardsNobel Peace Prize