Hugo

“Pour vaincre ma rancœur, je pense à la destinée humaine. Chaque vie recèle une parcelle d’héroïsme, un héroïsme obscur fait d’abdications, de renoncements et d’acquiescements, sous le fouet impitoyable de la fatalité. Je pense aux aveugles du monde entier qui se meuvent dans le noir. Je pense aux paralytiques du monde entier qui se traînent. Je pense aux lépreux du monde entier que leur mal ampute.”
― Mariama Bâ, Une si longue lettre (Roman)

“I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“The United Nations relies on factuality—and steady ideals—to progress. “No institution,” he once observed, “can become effective unless it is forced to wrestle with the problems, the conflicts, and the tribulations of real life.”5 For this reason, he didn’t mind the clash of ideas and agendas at UN meetings large and small. On the contrary, he welcomed substantive debate and the often awkward search for solutions. “I feel that what very many people call negative sides—the talking, the conflicts, the flux of events, the uncertainties about outcomes and so on and so forth—are not negative sides but positive sides.”6 Obstacles and delays were to be expected: “Setbacks in efforts to implement an ideal do not prove that the ideal is wrong…. At the beginning of great changes in human society there must always be a stage of…frailty or seeming inconsistency.”7”
― Roger Lipsey, Politics and Conscience: Dag Hammarskjold on the Art of Ethical Leadership

“Leadership in this environment is categorically humbling because it is virtually impossible for an individual to accumulate enough knowledge to figure out all of the answers. Interdependence and constant change become a way of life in which humility in the face of this complexity has become a critical survival skill.”
― Edgar H Schein, Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust