Quotes by Dag Hammarskjold

“What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.”

“Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away.”

“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.”

“Freedom from fear could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights”

“The longest journey of any person is the journey inward”

“Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your convictions.”

“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. Lifes point of no return.”

“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”

“In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us”

“Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.”

“It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - from lack of character.”

“If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.”

“Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.”

“I dont know Who, or what, put the question, I dont know when it was put. I dont 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.”

“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.”

“The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.”

“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.”

“Time always seems long to the child who is waiting - for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day”

“If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party”

“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.”