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It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Don't dip your beard in the foam, Father!" They cried to Thorin. "It is long enough without watering it!
J. R. R. Tolkien
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This is the ending. Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fear pass away.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
You cannot pass," he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. "I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!" he said to himself, and it became a favourite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. "You aren't nearly through this adventure yet," he added, and that was pretty true as well.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Yet trees are not 'trees', until so named and seen and never were so named, till those had been who speech's involuted breath unfurled, faint echo and dim picture of the world
J. R. R. Tolkien -
For if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomable at the foundations of the Earth.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
For nothing is evil in the beginning.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Farewell! I go to find the Sun!
J. R. R. Tolkien -
The chief purpose of life, for any of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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You can make the Ring an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that awaits all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
For victory is victory, however small, nor is its worth only from what follows from it.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen, of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Third time pays for all.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?' A man may do both,' said Aragorn. 'For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of earth or is another planet of the science fiction sort but it's just an old fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the Ocean.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
After some time he felt for his pipe. It was not broken, and that was something. Then he felt for his pouch, and there was some tobacco in it, and that was something more. Then he felt for matches and he could not find any at all, and that shattered his hopes completely.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
We may indeed in counsel point to the higher road, but we cannot compel any free creature to walk upon it. That leadeth to tyranny, which disfigureth good and maketh it seem hateful.
J. R. R. Tolkien -
You may not like my burglar, but please don't damage him.
J. R. R. Tolkien