195 Quotes by Dag Hammarskjöld

Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.

When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.

To preserve the silence within--amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens--no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.

No cracking of the whip of wordsdisturbed his peacein a space that sung.

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.

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.

It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands.

Beneath the hush a whisper from long ago, promising peace of mind and a burden shared.No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled.

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