Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?
You can only come to the morning through the shadows.
There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.
Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.
You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
The world is not in your books and maps, it’s out there.
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.
His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?
It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit.
You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: and allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power.
It is useless to meet revenge with revenge; it will heal nothing.
It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.
A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.
How do you move on? You move on when your heart finally understands that there is no turning back.
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.
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
It’s a dangerous business, going out your door.
Little by little, one travels far.
True education is a kind of never ending story – a matter of continual beginnings, of habitual fresh starts, of persistent newness.