“These, are not my teardrops daughter dear

but the sheen of dew, that lingers here past other fields,

Where other fathers lie who kept their daughters, better far than I”

“Rashness succeeds often, still more often fails.”

“When anger rises, think of the consequences.”

“Responsibility demands sacrifice.”

"True Courage Is About Knowing Not When To Take A Life, But When To Spare One."

“Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.”

“Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,

Last eve in Beauty’s circle proudly gay,

The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,

The morn the marshalling in arms,—the day

Battle’s magnificently-stern array!

The thunder-clouds close o’er it, which when rent

The earth is covered thick with other clay

Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,

Rider and horse,—friend, foe,—in one red burial blent!”

“I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.

So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide.”

Painting by Paul Lasaine

“If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”

"All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved."

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”

“Asunder flies the man.

No single wound the gaping rupture seems

Where trickling crimson flows the tender streams

But from an opening horrible and wide

A thousand vessels pour the bursting tide

At once the winding channel’s course was broke

Where wandering life her maze journey took.”

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

“One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.”

“But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”

“Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”