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
Humility before the flower at the timber line is the gate which gives access to the path up the open fell.
Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation.
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.
The UN is not just a product of do-gooders. It is harshly real. The day will come when men will see the U.N. and what it means clearly. 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.
Every deed and every relationship is surrounded by an atmosphere of silence. Friendship needs no words -- it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
'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.
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.
Life demands from you only the strength you posses. One feat is possible -- not to have run away.
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.
Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your convictions.
It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity
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.
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.
Maturity - among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.