Selected quotes from "Markings", the private and posthumously
published journal of Dag Hammarskjold. Dag, the favorite son of
a wealthy and politically powerful Swedish family, was Secretary
General of the United Nations for two terms between 1953 and 1961.
He died in a plane crash in Rhodesia while on an official UN peace mission.

1.   You have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as
    it is still possible that you have something of value to contribute.
    This is the answer when you are groaning under what you consider a
    burden and an uncertainty prolonged ad infinitum.

2.   When the mornings freshness has been replaced by the weariness of
    midday, when the leg muscles quiver under the strain, the climb seems
    endless, and, suddenly, nothing will go quite as you wish- it is then
    that you must _not_ hesitate.

3.   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.

4.   If your goal is not determined by your most secret pathos, even victory
    will only make you painfully aware or your own weaknesses.

5.   What next? Why ask? Next will come a demand about which you already
    know all you need to know: that its sole measure is your own strength.

6.   At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose _your_ self?
    Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can
    build many I's. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the
    elector and the elected. Only one - which you will never find until
    you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of
    being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or
    greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of
    the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted
    to you which is _your_ I.

7.   We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we
    put into it is ours. He who wills adventure will experience it-according
    to the measure of his courage. He who wills sacrifice will be sacrificed-
    according to the measure of his purity of heart.

8.   Dare he, for whom circumstances make it possible to realize his
    true destiny, refuse it simply because he is not prepared to give up
    everything else?

9.   He who is challenged by Fate does not take umbrage at the terms.

10.  The last entry in Dag's journal, written 22 days before his death.

     August 24, 1961
     Is it a new country in another world of reality other than Day's? Or did I
     live there before Day was?

     I awoke to an ordinary morning with gray light reflected from the street,
     but still remembered the dark-blue night above the tree line, the open
     moor in moonlight, the crest in shadow. Remembered other dreams or the same
     mountain country: twice I stood on its summits, I stayed by its remotest
     lake, and followed the river towards its source. The seasons have changed,
     and the light and the weather and the hour. But it is the same land.
     And I begin to know the map and to get my bearings.

                        *                 *                 *

"Working at the edge of the development of human society is to work at the brink of
the unknown. Much of what is done will one day prove to have been of little avail.
That is no excuse for the failure to act on accordance with our best understanding,
in recognition of its limits, but with faith in the ultimate result of the creative evolution in which it
is our privilege to cooperate." 

                       -Dag Hammarskjold
                        Secretary-General of the United Nations, 1953-1961


	 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------