J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.

As human beings, it's good to build stories.

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.

As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

The most important thing is the story. Not the script, but the story.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

There's no good story without romance.

Specificity is the soul of narrative.

We are creatures of story.

I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, "Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in."

Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories

And if Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that cool props and special effects are not enough. Story comes first. Everything depends on story.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.