Lord of the Rings quotes: 25 lines, and who actually says them
Every line traced to the volume, the year and the chapter, with the film-only lines marked as film. Including the famous one almost everybody credits to the wrong character.
Lord of the Rings quotes are everywhere and almost nowhere is the source attached. Search the phrase and you get walls of text on coloured backgrounds: a line, a name, no volume, no chapter, no year, and no way to tell whether Tolkien wrote it or a screenwriter did in 2001.
That last distinction matters more than it sounds. Three of the most-posted lines in this whole search result are not in the books at all. Several others are in the books with different words. And at least one is routinely handed to a character who is not even in the scene.
So every quote below names the person who says it, the volume it comes from, the year that volume was published, and the chapter you would open to find it. Where the film says something different, the film version sits in its own section at the bottom, labelled, with the change spelled out.
A note on how this page was checked, because it is the only thing that separates it from the rest of the results. Tolkien is still in copyright, so this is not the public-domain lane where you can open the full text and match a sentence in place. Each line here was checked against chapter-indexed reference pages for the three volumes, one line at a time. Three quotes that a lot of sites run were cut this week because that check could not confirm them.
For travel quotes generally rather than Middle-earth specifically, the library is at travel quotes. If it is the funny end you want, the collection is funny travel quotes.
Lord of the Rings quotes: the short answer
quotes
Four of these are . The fifth is the one everyone thinks is , and it is worth the space on its own, because it is the single most common attribution error in the whole Middle-earth canon.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?
Said to Frodo about Gollum, early, long before it matters. The whole ending of the story is sitting in that question and neither of them knows it yet.
Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
Five words that a wizard uses to admit the limits of being a wizard. It is also the closest thing the book has to a thesis.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
quoting himself, back at Saruman, inside the Council. Rarely posted, and the best line in the book about taking something apart to understand it.
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
Correctly quoted, consistently miscredited. This is Gildor, an Elf of Rivendell whom Frodo meets in the Woody End in chapter three, and it is a wry piece of advice about , not from him. is not present. If you have seen it posted over a picture of Ian McKellen, that is the error, and it is on a genuinely enormous number of pages.
Bilbo and Frodo quotes
The hobbit lines are the travel lines. Between them Bilbo and Frodo produce most of what this site exists for: the door, the road, the moment of stepping out, and the strong suspicion that this was a bad idea.
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.
The best travel sentence in English, and the film changes three things in it. Tolkien wrote “going out of your door”; the film drops the “of”. Tolkien wrote “You step into the Road”, capital R, because the Road is close to a character in this book; the film says “onto the road”. And Tolkien ends “there is no knowing”, where the film says “there’s no telling”. Note also that it is Bilbo’s line. Frodo is quoting him.
The Road goes ever on and on, Down from the door where it began.
Bilbo sings it on the way out the door at the end of his own birthday party. Tolkien reuses the same opening for Frodo later and again for Bilbo, older and sleepier, at Rivendell, which is the quiet trick of the whole book: the road is the same road, the traveller is not the same traveller.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.
A sentence that takes three reads and is an insult on all of them. It is also the single funniest line Tolkien wrote and it is doing real work: Bilbo is saying goodbye to people he is about to walk out on.
I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.
Everything anyone has ever said about setting out without a plan, in eleven words, from the least qualified person in the room.
Short cuts make delays, but inns make longer ones.
Widely posted as “short cuts make long delays” and widely credited to Pippin. It is Frodo, and the joke is at Pippin’s expense: Pippin has been talking up the beer at an inn they would have to pass, and Frodo is refusing to be steered.
Home is behind, the world ahead, And there are many paths to tread
Written by Bilbo inside the story and sung by the three hobbits on their first night out of Hobbiton. Six words in and the entire premise of leaving is done.
Aragorn, Sam and the Fellowship
These are the road lines: setting out with people, keeping going, and the two at the end that are about carrying someone. Every one of them is book text, and several are noticeably better than the film versions that replaced them.
Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.
This is the book’s version of the line the film gives to Galadriel as “even the smallest person can change the course of the future”. ’s is longer, harder and better: small hands act because nobody else is going to, not because they are secretly powerful.
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
Gimli, arguing that the Fellowship should not be asked to swear oaths about how far they will go. Rarely quoted, and the better half of a two-part exchange.
Let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.
The other half. is not disagreeing that loyalty matters, he is saying you cannot promise a thing you have not seen yet. Quote card 13 without card 14 and you get half an argument, which is how it usually appears.
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair
Said by a march-warden of Lothlórien to a group who have just lost . It is the most quietly optimistic sentence in the trilogy and it belongs to a minor character with about four scenes.
I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well.
The film shortens this to “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you!” and it is the more famous version. The book’s last four words are the point though: Sam is carrying Frodo and the Ring’s weight through Frodo, and he knows it.
I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.
Book and film agree almost exactly on this one, which is rare, and it is the line the whole journey has been walking toward.
The Riddle of Strider: not all those who wander are lost
Two lines from the same four-line verse, which is the most misunderstood piece of writing in the book. Bilbo wrote it, it is about Aragorn, and it reaches the reader inside a letter leaves at the inn at Bree.
The full history of how the second line gets mangled, who says it, and where the “all who wander are not lost” version came from is set out on its own page: not all those who wander are lost. The short version is below.
All that is gold does not glitter
Not a garbled version of Shakespeare. Tolkien reversed the proverb on purpose. Shakespeare’s line means that shiny things are often worthless; Tolkien’s means that worthwhile things are often not shiny, which is a statement about a king dressed as a ranger. People “correct” this one constantly, and the correction is the error.
Not all those who wander are lost.
Genuine Tolkien, usually misquoted and usually miscredited. The word order is “Not all those who wander are lost”, not “All who wander are not lost”, which means something different. And it is Bilbo writing about Aragorn, not Aragorn talking about himself.
Short Lord of the Rings quotes
Two that fit in a caption box and survive being separated from their page. If you want more short ones, the tightest lines above are card 3, card 9 and card 19.
Fly, you fools!
Three words, and “fly” means flee rather than take to the air, which is the sort of thing worth knowing before you put it on anything permanent.
I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.
Almost always posted as the four-word fragment “not all tears are an evil”. The first half is what makes it work: he is not telling anyone to stop.
Book vs film: who actually says what
The four below are the ones that cause the most trouble. Three were written for the films and appear nowhere in Tolkien. The fourth is not Tolkien at all and is the line people reach for when they think they are correcting him. None of this makes them bad lines. It makes them film lines, and if you are attributing them to a 1954 novel you are wrong in a way that is easy to avoid.
A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to.
Written for the film. It is not in The Fellowship of the Ring, or in any of the six books that make up the trilogy. It is a very good line and Tolkien did not write it.
Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
Also written for the film, and spoken by the wrong character to boot: the sentiment belongs to in the book, at the Council, in the longer form quoted as card 12. If you want the Tolkien version, quote .
There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.
The most-posted Sam quote and it is not in The Two Towers. Sam does have a long speech about stories in the book, in “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol”, and it says something rather different: that the people in the tales that mattered did not choose them and could have turned back, and did not.
All that glisters is not gold
Included because it is the reason card 18 gets “fixed” by strangers. Shakespeare wrote “glisters”, not “glitters”, and he meant the opposite of what Tolkien meant. Two different lines, three and a half centuries apart, and neither is a mistake.
Notes on the selection
Every line here had to clear one bar: a named speaker, a named volume with a year, and a named chapter. Where the line is from a film instead, it says so, with the studio, the year and the screenwriters.
Twenty-three of the twenty-five cards are new to this site. Two are not: the walking song and the wander-lost line were already verified here, and both are on the page because the sections would be dishonest without them, not to pad the count.
Cut this week, and worth naming: three lines that are all over other Lord of the Rings quote pages could not be confirmed to a chapter in the time available, so they are not here. They may well be genuine. That is not the same as checked, and this page only prints checked.
The verification is secondary, not primary, and that is a real limit. Tolkien is in copyright, so there is no free full text to search the way there is for a Victorian travel book. Each line was checked one at a time against chapter-indexed reference pages for the three volumes rather than against other quote sites, which is the meaningful distinction, but it is a step further from the page than we would like. Where a chapter is named here, a chapter-indexed source named it.
If you want to check any of these yourself, the hardcover set is the one with the chapter divisions the citations above use: Lord of the Rings box sets covers the editions worth owning. The running list of quotes we have traced and corrected across the site lives at travel quote fact-checks.
Questions people ask about Lord of the Rings quotes
What is the most iconic line from Lord of the Rings?
By volume of use it is ’s “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”, from The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), in the chapter “The Shadow of the Past”. Note the wording: the book says “the time that is given us” and the 2001 film says “given to us”. The other contender is Bilbo’s “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door”, from the same volume, in “Three is Company”.
What is 's most famous quote?
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”, in “The Shadow of the Past”, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954. Two other lines from the same conversation are quoted almost as often: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?” and “Even the very wise cannot see all ends.” One line frequently attributed to him is not his at all: “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger” is spoken by Gildor, an Elf, in chapter three, and is not in the scene.
What is Bilbo's famous quote?
Bilbo has three. The dangerous-business line about going out of your door, in “Three is Company”. The birthday speech, “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like”, in “A Long-expected Party”. And, less obviously, “Not all those who wander are lost”, which readers usually assign to Aragorn: it is Bilbo’s verse about Aragorn, reaching Frodo inside a letter from . The full account is on our page about that line, linked in the Riddle of Strider section above.
Is “not all those who wander are lost” from the book or the movie?
The book, and it predates the films by nearly fifty years. It is the second line of the Riddle of Strider in The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), book I chapter 10, “Strider”. Two things go wrong with it in circulation. The word order is often flipped to “All who wander are not lost”, which means something else entirely. And it is regularly credited to Aragorn, or to the films, when it is Bilbo’s verse about Aragorn, quoted in a letter leaves at Bree.
The most quoted line in the trilogy, and the wording is a small trap. Tolkien wrote “the time that is given us”. Ian McKellen says “the time that is given to us” in the 2001 film, and that extra word has propagated across most of the internet. Both are real; only one is the book.