Dag Hammarskjöld Quotes

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds

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 the right road.

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

We’ve got to learn hard things in our lifetime, but it’s love that gives you the strength. It’s being nice to people and having a lot of fun and laughing harder than anything, hopefully every single day of your life.

Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.

The longest journey is the journey inwards. Of him who has chosen his destiny, Who has started upon his quest for the source of his being.

Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who ‘forgives’ you, out of love, takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice. The price you must pay for your own liberation through another’s sacrifice is that you, in turn, must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

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

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.

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.

When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one’s body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.