All Quotes

"This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power."

"In soft regions are born soft men."

"Call no man happy till he dies."

"Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh."

"Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before."

"The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance."

"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects."

"The invention of brewing is ascribed to the Egyptians... from whence it seems to have passed to... western nations... Herodotus attributes the discovery of the art of brewing to the wife of ."

"If we take up his book, we are filled with admiration till the last syllable and always seek for more."

"The History of Herodotus works up the materials thus collected into an artistic picture of the world, grouped round a central idea. This idea is the great struggle between East and West, between Asiatic and Greek, of which the Persian Wars formed the last chapter. The History falls into two chief parts. The first five books are an introduction, tracing the rise and growth of the Persian power. The last four books relate the Persian invasions of Greece under Darius and Xerxes."

"It is a prose tragedy, which justifies the ways of Heaven to men by showing how sin is punished with ruin."

"He was the first artist in prose. As a historian, he fails chiefly by inattention or insensibility to political cause and effect. He will account for a great event merely by some accident which was the immediate occasion of it, without seeking to find any deeper source. And he tells us little or nothing about constitutional change. His charm of style is all the greater for his almost child-like simplicity, and he is one of the most delightful story-tellers. His narrative flows on in what the Greeks called the running style, seldom attempting compact periods."

"Herodotus was the first to organize a vast enquiry about a war and its causes. This is indeed the legacy of Herodotus to European historiography, and I am not going to say that it is an enviable legacy from every point of view. It has made war the central theme or one of the very central themes of European historiography ever since. If I had to answer the famous question an Oxford undergraduate once put to Sir John Myres – "Sir, if Herodotus was such a fool as they say, why do we read him for Greats?" – my answer would be that Herodotus was not only the founder of European historiography in a generic way: he provided European historiography with one of its leading and recurring themes, the study of war, in its origins, main events, results."

"We have now collected enough evidence to be able to say that he can be trusted. Curiously enough we are in a better position to judge him as an historian of the East than as historian of the Persian Wars. In the last century Orientalists have scrutinized Herodotus with the help of archaeology and with the knowledge of languages that he could not understand. They have ascertained that he described truthfully what he saw and reported honestly what he heard. Where he went wrong, either his informants misled him or he had misunderstood in good faith what he was told. We are not so well placed for the history of the Persian Wars because Herodotus himself remains our main source. Wherever we happen to be able to check him with the help of inscriptions or of simple topography, we have no reason to be dissatisfied with him... We know that his history is respectable because we are now able to check it against independent evidence."

"His epic tale of the Persian wars was a unique document of the Greek past."

"Wars are not favourable to delicate pleasures."

"My advice to all who have the time or inclination to concern themselves with the international language movement would be: 'Back Esperanto loyally.'"

"The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory, and what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected."

"Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more Perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to."

"There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done."

"“Where iss it? Where iss it?” Bilbo heard him crying. “Losst it is, my precious, lost, lost! Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!”"

"That story was the only thing I have ever done which cost me absolutely no pains at all. Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. I woke up one day (more than 2 years ago) with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out."

""The Shire" is based on rural England and not any other country in the world... The toponymy of The Shire...is a "parody" of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to. After all the book is English, and by an Englishman, and presumably even those who wish its narrative and dialogue turned into an idiom that they understand, will not ask of a translator that he should deliberately attempt to destroy the local colour."

"I should say that, in addition to my tree-love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with the Lord of the Rings, the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story..."

"I wept when I wrote that."

"I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much."

"I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones..."

"the most tragic moment in the Tale comes in II 323 ff. ['The Stairs of Cirith Ungol'] when Sam fails to note the complete change in Gollum's tone and aspect. 'Nothing, nothing', said Gollum softly. ‘Nice master!'. His repentance is blighted and all Frodo's pity is (in a sense) wasted. Shelob's lair became inevitable."

"I liked him better than all the other characters[…]"

"[C]ontrary to most people, I think that touching your cap to the squire may be damn bad for the squire but it's damn good for you."

"Gueroult: I thought that conceivably Midgard might be Middle-earth or have some connection? Tolkien: Oh, it is; they're the same word. Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of Earth or is another planet of the science-fiction sort, but it's simply an old-fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the ocean. Gueroult: It seemed to me that Middle-earth was, in a sense, as you say, "this world we live in", but this world we live in at a different era. Tolkien: No, at a different stage of imagination, yes."

"It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines. At least I find it so. In fact I dislike Dune with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment."

"Every morning I wake up and think good, another 24 hours' pipe-smoking."

"If you really come down to any large story that interests people – holds the attention for a considerable time ... human stories are practically always about one thing, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death."

"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."

"I do so dearly believe that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly."

"I wish life was not so short," he thought. "Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about."

"[M]y friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers."

"Trees are not 'trees', until so named and seen — and never were so named, till those had been who speech's involuted breath unfurled, faint echo and dim picture of the world."

"The heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed."

"All wishes are not idle, nor in vain fulfilment we devise — for pain is pain, not for itself to be desired, but ill; or else to strive or to subdue the will alike were graceless; and of Evil this alone is deadly certain: Evil is."

"Though all the crannies of the world we filled with elves and goblins, though we dared to build gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sow the seeds of dragons, 'twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we're made."

"Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time."

"To many, perhaps to most people outside the small company of the great scholars, past and present, 'Celtic' of any sort is, nonetheless, a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come. … Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason."

"In Paradise perchance the eye may stray from gazing upon everlasting Day to see the day-illumined, and renew from mirrored truth the likeness of the True. Then looking on the Blessed Land 'twill see that all is as it is, and yet made free: Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys, garden nor gardener, children nor their toys. Evil will not see, for evil lies not in God's picture but in crooked eyes, not in the source but in malicious choice, and not in sound but in the tuneless voice. In Paradise they no more look awry; and though they make anew, they make no lie. Be sure they still will make, not being dead, and poets shall have flames upon their head, and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall: there each shall choose for ever from the All."

"The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power."

"In such 'fantasy', as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator."

"Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men."

"The story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed."

"I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril."