Top 100 Dag Hammarskjöld Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

52. “Unless there is a spiritual renaissance, the world will know no peace.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

53. “I have only my own burden to bear.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

54. “Acts of violence – Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death – and the meaninglessness of killing.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

55. “I never discuss discussions.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

56. “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

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

— Dag Hammarskjöld

58. “To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

59. “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

60. “Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

61. “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.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

62. “It is more important to understand the ground of your own behavior than to understand the motives of another.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

63. “Fatigue dulls the pain, but awakes enticing thoughts of death. So! that is the way in which you are tempted to overcome your loneliness – by making the ultimate escape from life. – No! It may be that death is to be your ultimate gift to life: it must not be an act of treachery against it.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “You wake from dreams of doom and – for a moment – you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love’s calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

68. “On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

69. “It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy – from lack of character.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

70. “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

71. “Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

72. “He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

73. “The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

74. “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.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

75. “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.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

76. “Doffing the ego’s safe glory, he finds his naked reality.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

77. “It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals – though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt – but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I – in complacent adjustment to alien demands.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

78. “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.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

79. “The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

80. “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

81. “The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

82. “Setbacks in trying to realize the ideal do not prove that the ideal is at fault.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

83. “The ‘great’ commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

84. “Destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

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

— Dag Hammarskjöld

86. “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

87. “Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

88. “When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one’s body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

89. “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

90. “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.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

91. “Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

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

— Dag Hammarskjöld

93. “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

94. “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.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

95. “Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

96. “Isn’t the fulfillment of our duty towards our neighbor an expression of deepest desire?”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

97. “Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

98. “Friendship needs no words.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld

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

— Dag Hammarskjöld

100. “Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines.”

— Dag Hammarskjöld