“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”

Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.

What does your heart tell you?

There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not wrecked by the frost.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings.

Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

No Victory Without Suffering

What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’

I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number.

In this hour, I do not believe that any darkness will endure.

May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.

Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.

The way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut.

A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship.

Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’ There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.

Strictly speaking, one should not even rightly compare virginity to marriage because you cannot make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil.

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.

While truth is always bitter, pleasantness waits upon evildoing.

Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes.