Dag Hammarskjöld Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

Never, "for the sake of peace and quiet," deny your own experience or convictions.

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

Dag Hammarskjöld
Friendship needs no words — it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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.

Dag Hammarskjöld
A man of firm convictions does not ask, and does not receive, understanding from those with whom he comes into conflict. … A mature man is his own judge. In the end, his only firm support is being faithful to his own convictions. The advice of others may be welcome and valuable, but it does not free him from responsibility. Therefore, he may become very lonely.

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

Dag Hammarskjöld
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.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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..."

Dag Hammarskjöld
Maturity: among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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 again made clean.

Dag Hammarskjöld
Your body must become familiar with its death — in all its possible forms and degrees — as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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?

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

Dag Hammarskjöld
I don't know Who — or what — put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

Dag Hammarskjöld
"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.

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

Dag Hammarskjöld
For all that has been — Thanks. For all that shall be — Yes.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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.

Dag Hammarskjöld
Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away.

Dag Hammarskjöld
In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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 Hammarskjöld
In the last analysis it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions life puts to us … Hence too the necessity of preparing for it.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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.

Dag Hammarskjöld
If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.

Dag Hammarskjöld
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

Dag Hammarskjöld
Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy.

Dag Hammarskjöld
Setbacks in trying to realize the ideal do not prove that the ideal is at fault.

Dag Hammarskjöld