All Quotes

"Hesiod, the oldest author to have written on theogony, asserted that the gods and men are created by unknown natural forces. We can therefore consider paganism as a superstitious form of atheism."

"It is a little bit humiliating when I have to say that Chou En-lai to me appears as the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign politics...[He is] so much more dangerous than you imagine because he is so much better a man than you have ever admitted."

"The big, shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant non-Communists with hail and thunder."

"Friendship needs no words — it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness."

"Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away."

"Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy."

"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."

"Mät aldrig bergets höjd förrän du nått toppen. Då skall du se hur lågt det var."

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

"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."

"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."

"Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines."

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

"Är livet fattigt? Är icke snarare din hand för smal, dina ögonlinser grumlade? Det är du som måste växa."

"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."

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

"Bed att din ensamhet blir sporren att finna något att leva för, stort nog att dö för."

"Jag kämpar för det omöjliga: att mitt liv skall få en mening. Jag vågar inte, vet inte hur jag skulle kunna tro: att jag inte är ensam."

"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 easy to be nice, even to an enemy — from lack of character."

"For all that has been — Thanks! To all that shall be — Yes!"

"Att vara fri, att kunna stå upp och lämna allt — utan att se sig tillbaka. Att säga ja —"

"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."

"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...""

"Le courage de nos différences. Without becoming irresponsible, to accept what divides us — with humility and with pride. It is by the 'new' that mankind is saved or betrayed."

"In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action."

"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is again made clean."

"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 — Then He can use you — then, perhaps, He will use you."

"I believe that we should die with decency so that at least decency will survive."

"Destiny is something not be to desired and not to be avoided...it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning."

"The myths have always condemned those who "looked back." Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision."

"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."

""To forgive oneself"—? No, that doesn't work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive."

"Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment."

"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."

"Your body must become familiar with its death — in all its possible forms and degrees — as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life."

"In the faith which is "God's marriage to the soul", you are one in God, and God is wholly in you, just as, for you, He is wholly in all you meet. With this faith, in prayer you descend into yourself to meet the Other."

"Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons."

"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."

"I don't know Who — or what — put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't 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."

"Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up."

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

"It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses."

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

"Creative people have to be fed from the divine source."

"The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have."

"It will not surprise you to hear that Dag Hammarskjöld is a figure of great importance for me — as he must be for any Secretary-General. His life and his death, his words and his action, have done more to shape public expectations of the office, and indeed of the Organisation, than those of any other man or woman in its history.His wisdom and his modesty, his unimpeachable integrity and single-minded devotion to duty, have set a standard for all servants of the international community — and especially, of course for his successors — which is simply impossible to live up to. There can be no better rule of thumb for a Secretary-General, as he approaches each new challenge or crisis, than to ask himself, “how would Hammarskjöld have handled this?”"

"Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick."

"He would remind us how man once organized himself in families, how families joined together in tribes and villages, and how tribes and villages developed into peoples and nations. But the nation could not be the end of such development. In the Charter of the United Nations he saw a guide to what he called an organized international community.With an intensity that grew stronger each year, he stressed in his annual reports to the General Assembly that the United Nations had to be shaped into a dynamic instrument in the service of development. In his last report, in a tone of voice penetrating because of its very restraint, he confronted those member states which were clinging to "the time-honored philosophy of sovereign national states in armed competition, of which the most that may be expected is that they achieve a peaceful coexistence". This philosophy did not meet the needs of a world of ever increasing interdependence, where nations have at their disposal armaments of hitherto unknown destructive strength. The United Nations must open up ways to more developed forms of international cooperation."

"He has a physical stamina unique in the world, a man who night after night has gone with one or two hours of sleep and worked all day intelligently and devotedly."