Dag Hammarskjold (1905 – 1961)
Swedish diplomat, the second United Nations Secretary-General, and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.
It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is when we all play safe that fatality will lead us to our doom. It is in the "dark shade of courage" alone that the spell can be broken.
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy — from lack of character.
Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.
Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity — intellectual, emotional, and moral.
Respect for the word — to employ it with scrupulous care and in incorruptible heartfelt love of truth — is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.
To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.
"But I say unto you, that every idle word that men speak..."
It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.
In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.
He who has surrendered himself to it knows that the Way ends on the Cross — even when it is leading him through the jubilation of Gennesaret or the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.
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 his right road.
There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return.
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.
In the last analysis it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions life puts to us ... Hence too the necessity of preparing for it.
Never, "for the sake of peace and quiet," deny your own experience or convictions.
Time goes by, reputation increases, ability declines.
Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.
To love life and men as God loves them —
for the sake of
their infinite possibilities,
to wait like Him,
to judge like Him,
without passing judgment,
to obey the order when it is given
and never look back.
The big, shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant non-Communists with hail and thunder.
You are not the oil, you are not the air — merely the point of combustion, the flash-point where the light is born. You are merely 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.
I never discuss discussions.
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.