J. R. R. Tolkien

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

Fidelity has enfranchised slaves, and adopted servants to be sons.

I wish for you the wisdom to realize that forgiveness has nothing to do with an apology.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

The people are to be taken in small doses.

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption”.

Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.

Cultivate kindness today and always.

That man is idle who can do something better.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.