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
Life demands from you only the strength you posses. One feat is possible -- not to have run away.
Smiling, sincere, incorruptible - His body disciplined and limber. A man who had become what he could, And was what he was- Ready at any moment to gather everything Into one simple sacrifice.
Life yields only to the conqueror.
Do not seek death. Death will find you,
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.
Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away.
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
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.
In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.
You are 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.
Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.
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.