Top 500 J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “You are a set of deceitful scoundrels! But bless you! I give in. I will take Gildor’s advice. If the danger were not so dark, I should dance for joy. Even so, I cannot help feeling happy; happier than I have felt for a long time.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

452. “And then alas! I let the matter reset, watching and waiting only, as we have too often done.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

453. “If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

454. “The washing-up was so dismally real that Bilbo was forced to believe the party of the night before had not been part of his bad dreams, as he had rather hoped.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

455. “That was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling anyone there anything that was not known already. But he was rudely interrupted.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

456. “Rover did not know in the least where the moon’s path led to, and at present he was much too frightened and excited to ask, and anyway he was beginning to get used to extraordinary things happening to him.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

457. “Lurking by a stagnant mere, peering in the water as the dark eve fell, I caught him, Gollum. He was covered with green slime. He will never love me, I fear; for he bit me, and I was not gentle. Nothing more did I ever get from his mouth than the marks of his teeth.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

458. “He is not half through yet, and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

459. “It is plain that we were meant to go together.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

460. “As the light upon the leaves of trees, as the voice of clear waters, as the stars above the mists of the world, such was her glory and her loveliness; and in her face was a shining light.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

461. “I will not give you counsel, saying do this, or do that. For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

462. “Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

463. “You’re a booby,” said William. “Booby yerself!” said Tom.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

464. “There was some murmuring, but also some grins on the faces of the men looking on: the sight of their Captain sitting on the ground and eye to eye with a young hobbit, legs well apart, bristling with wrath, was one beyond their experience.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

465. “Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried: ‘Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!’ Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive...”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

466. “Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. ‘Strider’ I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

467. “They had begun to forget: forget their own beginnings and legends, forget what little they had known about the greatness of the world. It was not yet gone, but it was getting buried: the memory of the high and the perilous. But you cannot teach that sort of thing to a whole people quickly. There was not time. And anyway you must begin at some point, with some one person. I dare say he was “chosen” and I was only chosen to choose him; but I picked out Bilbo.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

468. “The eagles are coming!”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

469. “A fair vision had welcomed him in this land of disease.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

470. “He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

471. “But where our hearts truly lie is in peace and quiet and good tilled earth.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

472. “I have thought of a nice ending for it: and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.’ Gandalf laughed. ‘I hope he will. But nobody will read the book, however it ends.’ ‘Oh, they may, in years to come. Frodo has read some already, as far as it has gone. You’ll keep an eye on Frodo, won’t you?’ ‘Yes, I will – two eyes, as often as I can spare them.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

473. “It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

474. “You let them out again, Old Man Willow!’ he said. ‘What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

475. “There were many paths that led up into those mountains, and many passes over them. But most of the paths were cheats and deceptions and led nowhere or to bad ends; and most of the passes were infested by evil things and dreadful dangers. The dwarves and the hobbit, helped by the wise advice of Elrond and the knowledge and memory of Gandalf, took the right road to the right pass.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

476. “Riders!’ cried Aragorn, springing to his feet. ‘Many riders on swift steeds are coming towards us!’ ‘Yes,’ said Legolas, ‘there are one hundred and five. Yellow is their hair, and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall.’ Aragorn smiled. ‘Keen are the eyes of the Elves,’ he said. ‘Nay! The riders are little more than five leagues distant,’ said Legolas.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

477. “We renounce no friendship. But it may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly. And.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

478. “Well, no need to brood on what tomorrow may bring. For one thing, tomorrow will be certain to bring worse than today, for many days to come. And there is nothing more that I can do to help it. The board is set, and the pieces are moving. One.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

479. “What news from the North, O mighty wind, do you bring to me today? What news of Boromir the Bold? For he is long away.’ ‘Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he fought. His cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought. His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest; And Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, bore him upon its breast.’ ‘O Boromir! The Tower of Guard shall ever northward gaze To Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, until the end of days.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

480. “Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.’ ‘Is it indeed?’ laughed Gildor. ‘Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

481. “Winter is nearly gone. Time flows on to a spring of little hope.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

482. “The trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don’t do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming, or so i am told.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

483. “Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it’s damn good for you.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

484. “Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

485. “It was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

486. “I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones...”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

487. “We like the dark,” said all the dwarves. “Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

488. “The romantic chivalric tradition takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man’s eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

489. “Well, I am going back into the open air, to see what the wind and sky are doing!”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

490. “To think I should have lived to be goodmorninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

491. “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

492. “Leave him! I said. I never mean to. I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon; and if any of these Black Riders try to stop him, they’ll have Sam Gamgee to reckon with, I said. They laughed.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

493. “I have passed through fire and deep water, since we parted. I have forgotten much that I thought I knew, and learned again much that I had forgotten.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

494. “Dwarves are not heroes, but a calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

495. “I declare the Mountain besieged. You shall not depart from it, until you call on your side for a truce and a parley. We will bear no weapons against you, but we leave you to your gold. You may eat that, if you will!”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

496. “This is the Arkenstone of Thrain,” said Bilbo, “the Heart of the Mountain; and it is also the heart of Thorin.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

497. “For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

498. “But it seems that the wind is setting East, and the withering of all Woods may be drawing near.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

499. “Farewell!’ he said to Gandalf. ‘I go to find the Sun!’ Then swift as a runner over firm sand he shot away, and quickly overtaking the toiling men, with a wave of his hand he passed them, and sped into the distance, and vanished round the rocky turn.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien

500. “Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum – as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien