True education is a kind of never ending story — a matter of continual beginnings, of habitual fresh starts, of persistent newness.

Let us remember that a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend. It can be so, sometimes.

Chip the glasses and crack the plates! / Blunt the knives and bend the forks! / That's what Bilbo Baggins hates.

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!

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.

To think I should have lived to be goodmorninged by Belladonna Took's son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.