J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.

J. R. R. Tolkien

• Noble
• Heroic
• Meaningless
• Vulgar

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Quotes to Explore

• A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

  

  Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • World
  • Hero
  • Heroic

• It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

  

  E. M. Forster
  • Mind
  • Vice
  • Vulgar

• Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Arguments
  • Vulgar
  • Convincing

• Major religions are examples of 'noble lies' aimed at uplifting human stature.

  

  Jack Miller
  • Lies
  • Human
  • Religions

• Getting a record deal is a meaningless thing now.

  

  Oscar Isaac
  • Now
  • Deal
  • Meaningless

• In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Beautiful
  • Noble
  • Powerless

• Have all the hopes of ages come to naught? Is life no more with noble meaning fraught?

  

  Ada Cambridge
  • Life
  • Meaning
  • Noble

• When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.

  

  Andrew Solomon
  • History
  • Accepted
  • Heroic

• The art schools... you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.

  

  Leonard Baskin
  • Believe
  • Art
  • Kids

• Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.

  

  Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Good
  • Way
  • Noble

• The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Law
  • Practice
  • Study

• The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet.

  

  Benjamin Cardozo
  • Life
  • Hours
  • Heroic

• Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.

  

  Chuck Klosterman
  • Meaningless
  • Interaction
  • Soundtrack

• We could say that compassion is the ultimate attitude of wealth: an anti-poverty attitude, a war on want. It contains all sorts of heroic, juicy, positive, visionary, expansive qualities. And it implies larger scale thinking, a freer and more expansive way of relating to yourself and the world.

  

  Chogyam Trungpa
  • World
  • Thinking
  • War

• I count this thing to be grandly true: That a noble deed is a step toward God.

  

  Bill Vaughan
  • God
  • True
  • Steps

• The task of history is to hold out for reprobation every evil word and deed, and to hold out for praise every great and noble word and deed.

  

  Tacitus
  • Great
  • History
  • Evil

• Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

  

  Henry Ward Beecher
  • Man
  • Way
  • Ambition

• Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present behind all the arts.

  

  Hippocrates
  • Medicine
  • Judgement
  • Noble

• Spare me therefore, your good intentions, your inner sensitivities, your unarticulated and unexpressed love. And spare me also these tedious psycho-historians which, by exposing the goodness inside the bad man, and the evil in the good-invariably establish a vulgar and perverse egalitarianism, as if the arrangement of what is outside and what inside makes no moral difference.

  

  Willard Gaylin
  • Men
  • Evil
  • Moral

• Not by force shall the children learn, but through play.

  

  Plato
  • Children
  • Play
  • Force

• The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.

  

  Ida Tarbell
  • Lost
  • Value
  • Chance

• But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Truth

• Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.

  

  J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Noble
  • Heroic
  • Meaningless