Dag Hammarskjold – 21 Quotes

21 Quotes by Dag Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold

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

– Dag Hammarskjold

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

– Dag Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold

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

– Dag Hammarskjold

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

– Dag Hammarskjold

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.

– Dag Hammarskjold

Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

– Dag Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

– Dag Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold

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

– Dag Hammarskjold

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

– Dag Hammarskjold

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

– Dag Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold

Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.

– Dag Hammarskjold

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

– Dag Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold

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 Hammarskjold