Dag Hammarskjöld Quotes

When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

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

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

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.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

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

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Trees quiver in the wind,sailing on a sea of mistout of earshot.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

To preserve the silence within--amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens--no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Doffing the ego'ssafe glory, he findshis naked reality.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

You are not the oil, you are not the air—merely the point of combustion, the flash-point where the light is born. You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency—your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end and remain purely as a means.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who 'forgives' you--out of love--takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.The price you must pay for your own liberation through another's sacrifice is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.

~ 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

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

This accidentalmeeting of possibilitiescalls itself I.I ask: what am I doing here?And, at once, this Ibecomes unreal.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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.To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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*.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

His moral lectureblazed with hate.What could have driven a child that far?

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

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.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Like wind-- In it, with it, of it. Of it just like a sail, so light and strong that, even when it is bent flat, it gathers all the power of the wind without hampering its course.Like light-- In light, lit through by light, transformed into light. Like the lens which disappears in the light it focuses.Like wind. Like light.Just this--on these expanses, on these heights.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

My home drove meinto the wilderness.Few look for me. Few hear me.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Better than other people.' Sometimes he says: 'That, at least, you are.' But more often: 'Why should you be? Either you are what you can be, or you are not - like other people.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Apes. The moon woke them--round the world's navel revolvedprayer wheels of steps.

~ 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

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 his right road.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Time goes by: reputation increases ability declines.

~ 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

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

Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small your vision which is muddied? You are the one who must grow up.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

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

~ 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

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