Dag Hammarskjold Quotes - Page 3

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

When the morning's freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles give under the strain, the climb seems endless, and suddenly nothing will go quite as you wish it is then that you must not hesitate.

We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.

It is playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.

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.

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

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

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.

Be grateful as your deeds become less and less associated with your name, as your feet ever more lightly tread the earth.

The 'great' commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one.

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.

I am the vessel. The draft is God's. And God is the thirsty one.

Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one--which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*.

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.

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

It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. That is why you are faithful to it, even while you stand waiting, so long as you are prepared, and act the moment you are confronted by its demands.

If a good person does you wrong, act as though you had not noticed it. They will make note of this and not remain in your debt long.

The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped me in their peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the wonder: that *I* exist.

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.

Each day the first day: Each day a life.

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is ? is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.

Perhaps a great love is never returned.

The world cannot live at peace without the United Nations. For this reason: it creates a reasonable guarantee that all this change in the world, these tremendous political and economic developments, can be channelized, kept orderly. The United Nations is a mold that keeps the hot metal from spilling over.