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True courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one.

J. R. R. Tolkien

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J. R. R. Tolkien
Age: 81 †
Born: 1892
Born: January 3
Died: 1973
Died: September 2
Author
Essayist
Historian
Illustrator
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Literary Critic
Military Officer
Poet
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
John R. R. Tolkien
J-R-R Tolkien
Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
Life
Spare
Spares
Courage
Knowing
True
Take

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Farewell! O Gandalf! May you ever appear where you are most needed and least expected!
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I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo. So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
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Few there were who could change his courses by counsel. None by force.
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The doom lies in yourself, not in your name.
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Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?
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He did not go much further, but sat down on the cold floor and gave himself up to complete miserableness, for a long while. He thought of himself frying bacon and eggs in his own kitchen at home - for he could feel inside that it was high time for some meal or other but that only made him miserabler.
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His grief he will not forget but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.
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We are lost, lost,' said Gollum. 'No name, no business, no Precious, nothing. Only empty. Only hungry yes, we are hungry. A few little fishes, nasty bony little fishes, for a poor creature, and they say death. So wise they are so just, so very just
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It is mine, I tell you. My own. My precious. Yes, my precious.
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Such is of the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.
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Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.
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That's the only place in all the lands we've ever heard of that we don't want to see any closer and that's the one place we're trying to get to! And that's just where we can't get, nohow.
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There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am. Against some I have not yet been measured. But my time is coming.
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Such bees! Bilbo had never seen anything like them. If one were to sting me, He thought I should swell up as big as I am!
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The War is not over (and the one that is, or the part of it, has been largely lost). But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and War always goes on and it is no good growing faint.
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I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.
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It gives me great pleasure, a good name. I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.
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I have never had much confidence in my own work, and even now when I am assured (still much to my grateful surprise) that it has value for other people, I feel diffident, reluctant as it were to expose my world of imagination to possibly contemptuous eyes and ears.
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