J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

There is a comfort in rituals, and rituals provide a framework for stability when you are trying to find answers.

I hadn't grown up with 'The Hobbit;' I hadn't grown up with 'Lord of The Rings,' anything like that.

I measure everything, because I always think that if I've spent so much time making sure this recipe was exactly the way I want it, why would I want to throw things into a pot?

Numbers don't lie. I think it's pretty cut and dry what consistency is.

I always know what time it is.

I'm a simple man; I like to stick to what I know.

Certainty is no guarantor of correctness.

Consummated science is positively humble.

Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.

I always know where the scissors are.

A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.

I wish to God I knew as much about writing as I did when I was 19. I was absolutely certain about most things then. Also, I suspect, more accurate.

The best shooters shoot the exact same way every single time they look at the basket.

The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?

I think people respect me because they feel like - I'm kind of like Christmas. I come back every year. You can't get rid of me. I just keep coming back.

I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.

If my false figures came near to the facts, this happened merely by chance ... These comments are not worth printing. Yet it gives me pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of the truth ... In such manner did I dream of the truth.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

Even a stopped clock is right twice every day. After some years, it can boast of a long series of successes.

The Reader may here observe the Force of Numbers, which can be successfully applied, even to those things, which one would imagine are subject to no Rules. There are very few things which we know, which are not capable of being reduc'd to a Mathematical Reasoning, and when they cannot, it's a sign our Knowledge of them is very small and confus'd; and where a mathematical reasoning can be had, it's as great folly to make use of any other, as to grope for a thing in the dark when you have a Candle standing by you.

I would not be good with someone who did drugs. As long as I know something, I can deal with anything. I'm really good. But what I'm not good with is inconsistency. And I'm not good with not knowing.

...I will not allow books to prove any thing." "But how shall we prove any thing?" "We never shall.