Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations. As of 2021, he remains the youngest person to have held the post, having been only 47 years old when he was appointed in 1953. These Dag Hammarskjold quotes will motivate you.
Best Dag Hammarskjold Quotes
- “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
- “For all that has been, Thanks. To all that shall be, Yes.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “The UN wasn’t created to take mankind into paradise, but rather, to save humanity from hell.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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 Hammarskjold
- “I don’t know Who, or what, put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something,and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “We’ve got to learn hard things in our lifetime, but it’s love that gives you the strength. It’s being nice to people and having a lot of fun and laughing harder than anything, hopefully every single day of your life.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back. It must be held out empty – for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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 Hammarskjold
- “You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“Forgiving is forgetting, in spite of remembering.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “For all that has been, Thank you. For all that is to come, Yes!” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “The concept of loyalty is distorted when it is understood to mean blind acceptance. It is correctly interpreted when it is assumed to cover honest criticism.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “‘Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.” ~ 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
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“The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Do not look back and do not dream about the future. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward, your destiny, is in the present moment” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Never let success hide its emptiness from you, achievement its nothingness, toil its desolation. And so…keep alive the incentive to push on further, that pain in the soul which drives us beyond ourselves…Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward – your destiny – are here and now.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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 Hammarskjold
- “In the presence of God, nothing stands between Him and us – we are forgiven. But we cannot feel His presence if anything is allowed to stand between ourselves and others.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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 Hammarskjold
- “It is more important to understand the ground of your own behavior than to understand the motives of another.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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 Hammarskjold - “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 Hammarskjold
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“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Respect for the word – to employ it with scrupulous care and in incorruptible heartfelt love of truth – is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.
To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold - “We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Unless there is a spiritual renaissance, the world will know no peace.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “The ‘great’ commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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 Hammarskjold
- “The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.” ~ 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 longest journeyIs the journey inwards.Of him who has chosen his destiny, Who has started upon his quest For the source of his being.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“What you must dare: is to be yourself.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning. I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no – but refreshed, rested – while waiting.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold quotes
- “In a dream I walked with God through the deep places of creation; past walls that receded and gates that opened through hall after hall of silence, darkness and refreshment–the dwelling place of souls acquainted with light and warmth–until, around me, was an infinity into which we all flowed together and lived anew, like the rings made by raindrops falling upon wide expanses of calm dark waters.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“Be grateful as your deeds become less and less associated with your name, as your feet ever more lightly tread the earth.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “You dare your Yes – and experience a meaning…You repeat your Yes – and all things acquire a meaning…When everything has a meaning, how can you live anything but a YES.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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.” ~ 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
- “Perhaps a great love is never returned.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but only soldiers can do it.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“Only one feat is possible: not to have run away.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“I am the vessel. The draft is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “You take the pen, and the lines dance. You take the flute and the notes shimmer. You take the brush, and the colors sing. So all things have meaning and beauty in that space beyond time where you are. How, then, can I hold back anything from you?” ~ 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
- “Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
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“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.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “It was when Lucifer first congratulated himself upon his angelic behavior that he became the tool of evil.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “It is playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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 Hammarskjold
- “He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
- “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 Hammarskjold
- “Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.” ~ Dag Hammarskjold
