Dag Hammarskjöld Quotes

Swedish diplomat, economist, and author (1905-1961)

Dag Hammarskjöld (29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish diplomat, the second United Nations Secretary-General, and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. He oversaw U.N. responses to Cold War crises, the decolonization of Africa, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was killed in a plane crash while attempting to mediate the Congo Crisis.

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Alternative Names: Da gHjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld • Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld

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Meine Mittelmäßigkeit erkennen, nicht in geißelnder Selbstverachtung, nicht im Bekennerhochmut, sondern als Gefahr für die Integrität des Handels, wenn ich sie aus den Augen lasse.

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

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.

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.

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?

You are not the oil, you are not the air — merely the point of combustion, the flash-point where the light is born. You are merely 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.

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

Too tired for company,
You seek a solitude
You are too tired to fill.

Somebody placed the shuttle in your hand: somebody who had already arranged the threads.

You are your own god – and are surprised when you find that the wolf pack is hunting you across the desolate ice fields of winter.

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

"To be free, to rise and leave everything, without a glance back, behind. To say "yes"."

For all that has been, thanks; to all that will be, yes.

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.

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