J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.

Monuments, like men, submit to fate.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' 
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
 The lone and level sands stretch far away.

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.

We have lived too long. The great days are past.

Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.

We speak of stories ending, when in truth it is we who end. The stories go on and on.

All came from, and will goe to others.

Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this.

The appearance of strength is all about you. It would seem to last forever. However... the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen... and you will hear the creaking.

Maybe when I'm dead, I'll be forgiven, but I'm afraid I'll also be forgotten.

I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.

The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.

Something there is more immortal even than the stars.

It is a bitter thought to an avaricious spirit that by and by all these accumulations must be left behind. We can only carry away from this world the flavor of our good or evil deeds.

Let me not live, after my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff of younger spirits.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that is how much of a hole you leave when you're gone.