Dag Hammarskjold
Dag Hammarskjold
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld; 29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish diplomat, economist, and author. The second secretary-general of the United Nations, he served from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. At the age of 56 years and 255 days, Hammarskjöld was the youngest to have held the post. He is one of only four people to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize. Hammarskjöld is the only UN secretary-general to...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth29 July 1905
CountrySweden
Fatigue dulls the pain, but awakes enticing thoughts of death. So! that is the way in which you are tempted to overcome your loneliness -- by making the ultimate escape from life. -- No! It may be that death is to be your ultimate gift to life: it must not be an act of treachery against it.
Each day the first day: Each day a life.
He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.
The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
Destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided.
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.
Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.
The big, shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant non-Communists with hail and thunder.
In a political context of the utmost significance, ["freedom from fear"] recognizes a human right which, in a broad sense, may be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.
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.
It is a little bit humiliating when I have to say that Chou En-lai to me appears as the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign politics... so much more dangerous than you imagine because he is so much better a man than you have ever admitted.
It is not the Soviet Union or indeed any other big Powers who need the United Nations for their protection. It is all the others. In this sense, the Organization is first of all their Organization and I deeply believe in the wisdom with which they will be able to use it and guide it. I shall remain in my post during the term of my office as a servant of the Organization in the interests of all those other nations, as long as they wish me to do so.
Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.
At some moment I did answer "Yes" to someone or something. And from that hour on I was certain that existence is meaningful.