Dag Hammarskjöld: Doing

Dag Hammarskjöld was Swedish diplomat, economist, and author. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Dag Hammarskjöld: 116   quotes 5   likes

“The UN is not just a product of do-gooders. It is harshly real.”

Dag Hammarskjöld

As quoted in The Times [London] (27 June 1955)
Context: The UN is not just a product of do-gooders. It is harshly real. The day will come when men will see the UN and what it means clearly. 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.

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

Dag Hammarskjöld

Markings (1964)
Context: 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. Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.

Death

“Setbacks in trying to realize the ideal do not prove that the ideal is at fault.”

Dag Hammarskjöld

As quoted by Rolf Edberg, Swedish Ambassador to Norway, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Hammarskjöld in Oslo, Norway (10 December 1961) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1961/hammarskjold-acceptance.html

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

Dag Hammarskjöld

Markings (1964)

God , Animals

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

Dag Hammarskjöld

William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age (1825)
Misattributed

Business

“Do we refer to the purposes of the Charter? They are expressions of universally shared ideals which cannot fail us, though we, alas, often fail them. Or do we think of the institutions of the United Nations? They are our tools. We fashioned them. We use them. It is our responsibility to remedy any flaws there may be in them…. This is a difficult lesson for both idealists and realists, though for different reasons. I suppose that, just as the first temptation of the realist is the illusion of cynicism, so the first temptation of the idealist is the illusion of Utopia.”

Dag Hammarskjöld

"An International Administrative Service", From an Address to the International Law Association at McGill University, Montreal, 30 May, 1956. Wilder Foote (Ed.), The Servant of Peace, A Selection of the Speeches and Statements of Dag Hammarskjöld, The Bodley Head, London 1962, p. 116.

Universe , Fashion , Thinking