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
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
Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. – 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
The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. – Dag Hammarskjold
Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness. – Dag Hammarskjold
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. – 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
Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away. – 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
The longest journey is the journey inwards. Of him who has chosen his destiny, Who has started upon his quest for the source of his being. – Dag Hammarskjold
Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon. – Dag Hammarskjold
Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict. – 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
The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others. – Dag Hammarskjold
Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment. – 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
To forgive oneself? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive. – 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