Quotes by Dag Hammarskjöld

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.

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 Is. 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*.

His moral lectureblazed with hate.What could have driven a child that far?

You wake from dreams of doom and--for a moment--you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, loves calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.

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.

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.

Humility before the flower at the timber line is the gate which gives access to the path up the open fell.

My home drove meinto the wilderness.Few look for me. Few hear me.

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.

Apes. The moon woke them--round the worlds navel revolvedprayer wheels of steps.

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.