Quotes By Dag Hammarskjold

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

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

"Freedom from fear" could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.

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

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.

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

It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - from lack of character.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your convictions.

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.

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.

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

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.

Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I never discuss discussions.

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