The Royal Mountain

"And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? Sleepless questions In the small hours: Have I done right? Why did I act Just as I did? Over and over again The same steps, The same words: Never the answer." -Dag Hammarskjold

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement. To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your bearing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance. Towards this, so help me, God--    -Dag Hammarskjold

"Did you choose your words carefully enough, what impression did you make, did they think you were trying to be ingratiating, etc.? It is questions like these which keep you awake. Are you no longer confident that your instinctive reactions will guide you right? If so, you know why. You have allowed your hunger for 'justice' to make you self-conscious, so that, in the performance of your task, you no longer forget yourself. So, and only so, can you be wounded by the opinions of the crowd." -Dag Hammarskjold

Anxious for the good opinion of others, and jealous of the possibility that they may become 'famous', you have lowered yourself to wondering what will happen in the end to what you have done and been. How dead can a man be behind a façade of great ability, loyalty--and ambition! Bless your uneasiness as a sign that there is still life in you.  -Dag Hammarskjold

"Do you still need to evoke memories of a self-imposed humiliation in order to extinguish a smoldering self-admiration? To be pure in heart, among other things, means to have freed yourself from all such half-measures: from a tone of voice which places you in the limelight, a furtive acceptance of some desire of the flesh which ignores the desire of the spirit, a self-righteous reaction to others in their moments of weakness. Look at yourself in that mirror when you wish to be praised--or to judge. Do so without despairing." -Dag Hammarskjold

"Maturity: among other things, a new lack of self-consciousness--the kind you can only attain when you have become entirely indifferent to yourself through an absolute assent to your fate. He who has placed himself in God's hand stands free vis-a-vis men: he is entirely at his ease with them, because he has granted them to the right to judge." -Dag Hammarskjold