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, Markings

“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, Markings

“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, Markings

“Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.”
― 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, Markings

“Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions”
― 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, Markings

“Friendship needs no words.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“For all that has been,
Thank you.

For all that is to come,
Yes!”
― 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, Markings

“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, Markings

“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

“Life only demands from you the strength you possess.”
― 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, Markings

“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, Markings

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

“This accidental
meeting of possibilities
calls itself I.

I ask: what am I doing here?
And, at once, this I
becomes unreal.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“The longest journey is the journey inward.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“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 Hammarskjöld

“It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“Doffing the ego's
safe glory, he finds
his naked reality.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.”
― 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

“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, Markings

“Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“For all that has been, Thanks. To all that shall be, Yes.”
― 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 the right road. ”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“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 Hammarskjöld

“Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“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, Markings

“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, Markings

“Beneath the hush a whisper from long ago, promising peace of mind and a burden shared.

No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“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, Markings

“If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, -- quieter, warmer.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“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." page 58

The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them." page 62”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“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, Markings

“Humility before the flower at the timber line is the gate which gives access to the path up the open fell.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - from lack of character”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“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 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, Markings

“The 'mystical experience'. Always here and now - in that freedom which is one with distance in that stillness which is born of silence. But - this is a freedom in the midst of action, a stillness in the midst of other human beings. The mystery is a constant reality to him who, in this world, is free from self-concern, a reality that grows peaceful and mature before the receptive attention of assent. ”
― 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

“It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“PRAY that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for."
Dag Hammarskjold
Swedish diplomat (1905 - 1961)”
― 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, Markings

“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, Markings

“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny, but what we put into it is ours.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld