J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.

Lord, where we are wrong, make us willing to change; where we are right, make us easy to live with.

For me, everyone has good and bad qualities. I feel you must not always look at the bad qualities but also focus on the good ones, because we all have flaws.

Tolerance comes of age. I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other.

Keep up a humble sense of your own faults, and that will make you compassionate to others

I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart

Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others, as, by self-examination, thoroughly to know our own.

When men hate or blame you, or say hurtful things about you, look deeply into their hearts and see what kind of men they are. You'll see how unnecessary it is to strain after their good opinion. Yet you must still think kindly of them. they are your neighbors. The gods help them as they do you, by dreams and oracles, to win their hearts' desires.

So long as we are full of self we are shocked at the faults of others. Let us think often of our own sin, and we shall be lenient to the sins of others.

I'll tell you what I did need to learn was tolerance, and I think I've been actually given a daily opportunity to practice that, and it's - it's - and I know that that sounds almost like a backhanded slap, and it is in a way because I haven't been successful at it every day.

Compromise and tolerance are magic words. It took me 40 years to become philosophical.

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

Maybe it's because I'm a little naive, but I do like to think that there aren't really very many truly bad people in the world. I think that everybody has their reasons for what they do, and if you really look through their eyes, you could probably understand them.

Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn't with me as against me.

I think it's more optimistic about human nature to acknowledge that people are the products of their time but then to see that they have moments of grace and dignity that everybody has.

It's important to determine not just the quality of your mind but the fullness of your heart.

They say I've made mistakes, but they've been mistakes of the heart.

A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

There's gotta be a human being in everybody, regardless of what they do or what people think they did.

I like to play people who are deeply flawed, and I want to find the good nature in them. I even try to be kind to myself when I've made big mistakes.

I forgive very easily, and I suppose, in the same way, I expect to be forgiven very easily as well. I grew up with that.

If we had no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure in noticing those in others.