Dag Hammarskjöld Quotes

You have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as it is still possible that you have something to contribute.

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.

Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity — intellectual, emotional, and moral.
Respect for the word — to employ it with scrupulous care and in incorruptible heartfelt love of truth — is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.
To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.
"But I say unto you, that every idle word that men speak..."

Beneath the hush a whisper from long ago, promising peace of mind and a burden shared.

No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled.

In a dream I walked with God through the deep places of creation; past walls that receded and gates that opened through hall after hall of silence, darkness and refreshment — the dwelling place of souls acquainted with light and warmth — until, around me, was an infinity into which we all flowed together and lived anew, like the rings made by raindrops falling upon wide expanses of calm dark waters.

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

The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.

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 everything is and we just in it.

Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.

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

Is my contact with others anything more than a contact with reflections? Who or what can give me the power to transform the mirror into a doorway?

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* — is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.

To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.

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

A human intimacy — free from the earth but blessing the earth.

To preserve the silence within — amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens — no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.