Dag Hammarskjöld Quotes

Humility before the flower at the timber line is the gate which gives access to the path up the open fell.

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.

Life only demands from you the strength you possess.

Jesus' 'lack of moral principles.' He sat at meat with publicans and sinners, he consorted with harlots. Did he do this to obtain their votes? Or did he think that, perhaps, he could convert them by such 'appeasement'? Or was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all men, indestructible, and upon which the future is built?

For all that has been,
Thank you.
For all that is to come,
Yes!

I believe that we should die with decency so that at least decency will survive.

To the past: Thanks.
To the future: Yes.

The big, shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant non-Communists with hail and thunder.

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

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.

He stood erect - as a peg-top does as long as the whip keeps lashing it. He was modest - thanks to a robust conviction of his own superiority. He was unambitious - all he wanted was a life free from cares and he took more pleasure in the failures of others than in his own successes. He saved his life by never risking it - and complained that he was misunderstood.

It is a little bit humiliating when I have to say that Chou En-lai to me appears as the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign politics... so much more dangerous than you imagine because he is so much better a man than you have ever admitted.

I never discuss discussions.

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 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." page 58

The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them." page 62"