J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.\

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

Faith is not to get you out of a hard place but to change your heart in the hard place.

Our work is to keep our hearts open in hell.

It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me...if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me.

Prepare your hearts as a fortress, for there will be no other.

Contact with the world either breaks or hardens the heart.

The heart must be beaten or bruised, and then the sweet scent will come out.

People can live through hardship, but from hard feelings they perish.

When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is - heartbreaking bereavement.

Not to feel one's misfortunes is not human, not to bear them is not manly.

when the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives-and we cannot prevent them-let us, too, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.

To be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering.

Adversity can strengthen us if it does not go on too long.

What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust of bread, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came.

He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that--it didn't work.

You don't always get stronger on the days that everything comes easily to you.

Black care rarely sits behind the rider whose pace is fast enough.

This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.

Aand in the end, Having my freedom, boast of nothing else But that I was a journeyman to grief?

There is no such thing in life as no pain and no disappointment.

Disappointment came to me, and booted me, and bruised and hurt me, but that's how people grow up.

Without your downs, without your hardships, I don't think you appreciate the ups as much.