J. K. Rowling

Quotes

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.
You sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.
Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!
There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other.
To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
The best of us must sometimes eat our words.
It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
You think the dead we love ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them most plainly when we need? Your father is alive in you Harry and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him.
The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.
Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.
Anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.
What's coming will come and we'll just have to meet it when it does.
There is no good or evil: only power and those too weak to seek it.
Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.
It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your friends.
Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.
When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.
Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.
It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.
...people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right.
Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.
It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.
Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.
Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy.
Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.
What's comin' will come and we'll meet it when it does.
I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself.
The consequences of our actions are so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.
Achievable goals are the first step to self improvement.
There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, the responsibility lies with you.
It is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.
Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.
Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it.
Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than I was and began diverting all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not lived at all. In which case, you've failed by default.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.
You will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity.
Personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications are not your life.
Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and relevetory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to form of mental agoraphobia and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters, they are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude through our own apathy.
We touch other peoples lives simply by existing.
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.
If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
If you're holding out for universal popularity, I'm afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.
Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.