Words matter. These are the best Dag Hammarskjold Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy – from lack of character.
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.
It is playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.
Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.
If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.
Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your convictions.
Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.
Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.
It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.
The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.
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.
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 made clean again.
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.
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.
There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.
Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away.
In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.
The myths have always condemned those who ‘looked back.’ Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.
To forgive oneself? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.
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.
Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.
Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.
Time always seems long to the child who is waiting – for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.
It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.
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?
‘Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.
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.
I am the vessel. The draft is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.