The Hobbit quotes: 21 lines with the chapter attached, and 5 that come from the films
Every book line below is placed in the chapter it comes from, and every line the Jackson films wrote is labelled as film. Nobody on page one of this search tells you which is which.
Search for Hobbit quotes and you will be handed a mix of two different things. Some of the lines are Tolkien, written in 1937. Some were written for the screen between 2012 and 2014 by a team of screenwriters. Almost nowhere does anybody say which is which, and the pages ranking today are the worst offenders: one of them leads with a film line served as a book quote.
That matters more here than it does with most books, because the Hobbit films invented a great deal. Three films were made from a single short children’s novel, and the gap was filled with new dialogue. Some of it is very good. None of it is Tolkien.
So this page does the one thing the search results do not. Twenty-one lines from the book, each with the chapter it sits in, because chapters are stable across editions and page numbers are not. Then five of the most-shared lines that are not in the book at all, with the film they actually come from.
The companion page for the trilogy, built the same way, is at Lord of the Rings quotes, and the wider collection is at 100 best travel quotes.
What are the best quotes from The Hobbit? The 60-second answer
Bilbo Baggins quotes
Bilbo starts the book as a man who wants his second breakfast and ends it as someone the neighbours think is odd. The lines below track that in order, and the first one is the most famous opening sentence in English fantasy.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!
The whole plot is in the last four words. Bilbo’s objection to leaving home is not danger, it is the timetable.
I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth
Tolkien immediately translates this for the reader, and the gloss is the joke: what Bilbo means is what he is going to get out of it, and whether he is coming back alive. It is the most hobbit sentence in the book.
Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!
Said under his breath after he has just been far too clever at a dragon. Tolkien adds that it became a favourite saying of his later and passed into a proverb, which is a small joke about how proverbs actually get made.
Victory after all, I suppose! Well, it seems a very gloomy business.
Bilbo’s verdict on the Battle of Five Armies, delivered while he is still concussed. It is the least heroic reaction to a won battle in the canon, and it is the honest one.
Gandalf quotes
Gandalf is barely in the middle third of this book, which surprises people who come to it from the films. He gets the first joke and the last word.
What do you mean? Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?
Check this one against the version you know. The book reads “Do you wish me a good morning”. The 2012 film reads “Do you mean to wish me a good morning”, and rewrites every clause after it as well. Both versions are on this page so you can see the difference: the film’s is card 22.
There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself.
Gandalf’s entire case for bringing a grocer on a burglary, made before Bilbo has done anything to deserve it. He is not predicting. He is recruiting.
Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?
Bilbo has just said the old songs turned out to be true “after a fashion”, and this is the reply. It is the closest the book comes to stating its own argument about luck.
You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!
Bilbo laughs and hands him the tobacco jar. Read it as a deflation if you like, but it is the opposite: it is the line that makes the scale of the journey real, and Bilbo is delighted by it.
Thorin and the dwarves
Thorin spends most of the book being difficult and gets the best speech in it at the very end. Three of these four are from his deathbed in chapter 18.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
The single most quoted line from The Hobbit, and it is almost always cut loose from its situation. Thorin is dying, he has spent the last four chapters valuing hoarded gold above everything, and this is him conceding the argument. The sentence before it is card 12.
Farewell, good thief. I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed.
He calls Bilbo a thief to the end, and by this point it is affectionate. Thorin goes on to say he takes back his words and deeds at the Gate, which is the actual apology.
There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure.
This runs immediately before card 10 in the same speech. Read together they are one thought, and quoting only the merrier-world half is how the line lost its speaker.
There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money
Tolkien steps out of the story to say this about his own characters, then immediately adds that some of them are decent enough people if you do not expect too much. It is the narrator’s voice the films had no room for.
Hobbit quotes about home and going back
The subtitle of the book is There and Back Again, and the back-again half is the part that gets quoted least and matters most. These four are the travel spine of the story: what leaving does to you, and what it is like to arrive home as a different person.
As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves.
This is the moment the trip becomes inevitable, and it happens in his own living room, to a song. Nothing has been agreed and nobody has left the house.
As all things come to an end, even this story, a day came at last when they were in sight of the country where Bilbo had been born and bred, where the shapes of the land and of the trees were as well known to him as his hands and toes.
As good a sentence about coming home as exists in English, and it turns entirely on “as his hands and toes”. Familiarity as something you know in your body rather than recognise with your eyes.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen And horror in the halls of stone Look at last on meadows green And trees and hills they long have known.
Four lines, and the whole return journey is in the words “at last”. Bilbo composes it himself, which is the first sign of what he becomes afterwards.
He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shook their heads and touched their foreheads and said “Poor old Baggins!” and though few believed any of his tales, he remained very happy to the end of his days
The truest thing in the book about travel. He comes back changed, the neighbours decide he has gone peculiar, and he does not mind at all. Nobody at home is going to believe the story and it does not cost him anything.
Funny lines from The Hobbit
It is a children’s book and it is frequently very funny, usually at the narrator’s own expense. More in the same register at funny travel quotes.
Trolls are slow in the uptake, and mighty suspicious about anything new to them.
Delivered completely deadpan, as though it were a fact about badgers.
You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.
Worth a careful note. The half-line everybody prints in front of this one, “There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something”, could not be confirmed to a chapter in the indexed source this run, so this card runs only the half that could. See the selection notes.
Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don’t look like mutton again tomorrer
Tolkien gave the trolls cockney accents and a complaint about catering. It is the moment the book decides what kind of book it is.
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.
An entire origin myth for golf, dropped into a digression about Bilbo’s great-great-uncle, and never mentioned again.
Book or film: the lines Tolkien did not write
These five are in wide circulation as Hobbit quotes. None of them is in the book. They were written for An Unexpected Journey, released in 2012, the first of three films made from one short novel. They are labelled here rather than deleted, because they are good lines and people genuinely want them. They are just not Tolkien.
The other line this happens to constantly belongs to the trilogy rather than this book, and has its own page: not all those who wander are lost. The running list of lines we have traced or corrected is at travel quote fact-checks.
What do you mean? Do you mean to wish me a good morning, or do you mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not?
The clearest example on the page. The film keeps the shape of Tolkien’s joke and rewrites every clause in it. If you are quoting the book, card 6 is the wording you want.
I’m going on an adventure!
Not in the book in any form. In chapter 2 Bilbo runs out of his door without a pocket handkerchief and without a speech. Note also the contraction: it is “I’m”, not “I am”, which most caption pages get wrong as well as miscrediting.
The world is not in your books and maps. It’s out there.
Probably the most shared travel quote attributed to The Hobbit, and it was written for the screen in 2012. It is a good line. It is a screenwriter’s line.
True courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one.
The idea is Tolkien’s and runs through the whole Ring story. This sentence is not: it was written for the 2012 film.
This was a hobbit-hole and that means good food, a warm hearth, and all the comforts of home.
The book ends that sentence on four words: “and that means comfort”. The film spells out what comfort consists of. It is a small change and it is the difference between Tolkien’s rhythm and a voiceover.
Notes on the selection
The Hobbit is still in copyright, which changes how a page like this can honestly be built. For out-of-copyright books we download the full text and match every line in it before it goes on the page. That is not possible here: there is no free, complete, authorised English text of The Hobbit, and we checked rather than assumed.
So every line above was verified against a chapter-indexed reference instead, one line at a time, asking a specific question of each: does the text read this way or that way, who says it, and which chapter is it in. That is a credible secondary source. It is not a primary one, and we are not going to describe it as though it were. Our full sourcing standard is at editorial standards.
Chapters, not page numbers, and that is deliberate. “Hobbit quotes with page numbers” is a common search, and the honest answer is that page numbers are useless here: this book has been set and reset for ninety years across dozens of editions, and a page number from one of them will not find the line in yours. Chapter numbers have been stable since 1937.
Five lines were cut for failing that check rather than reworded to fit. “So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings”, “Third time pays for all”, “Every worm has his weak spot”, “Escaping goblins to be caught by wolves!” and “May the hair on your toes never fall out” are all widely quoted from this book, and none of them could be pinned to a chapter this run. They may well be genuine. Until we can say where, they do not run.
The verification pass also corrected four things we had wrong going in, including the chapter and the wording of card 19. That is the reason to run the pass rather than trust a memory of the book.
No line carded on our Lord of the Rings quotes page is repeated here. If you want the edition that makes chapter checking easy, the comparison is at best Lord of the Rings box sets.
Questions people ask about The Hobbit quotes
What is Bilbo Baggins’ famous line?
Two compete, and only one is Tolkien. In the book, the line most associated with him is his objection in chapter 1: “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!” The line most people actually quote, “I’m going on an adventure!”, is not in the book at all. It was written for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 2012.
What is Gandalf’s best quote from The Hobbit?
The good-morning exchange in chapter 1, where Gandalf takes a pleasantry apart: “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” The 2012 film rewrote it as “Do you mean to wish me a good morning, or do you mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not?” Both are on this page so you can pick the one you actually want. His last line in the book is the other candidate: “You are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”, chapter 19.
What are some funny quotes from The Hobbit?
Three, all sourced. “Trolls are slow in the uptake, and mighty suspicious about anything new to them”, chapter 2. “Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don’t look like mutton again tomorrer”, a troll, also chapter 2. And the golf origin story in chapter 1, where a goblin king’s head sails a hundred yards into a rabbit-hole “and in this way, the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment”.
Are The Hobbit movie quotes in the book?
Often not. Three films were made from one short novel and a lot of new dialogue was written to fill the gap. Two worked examples: “The world is not in your books and maps. It’s out there” was written for the 2012 film, and “I’m going on an adventure!” was too. Neither appears in Tolkien’s text in any form. The reverse also happens: the film keeps the shape of real book lines while changing the words, which is what it does to the opening sentence and to the good-morning exchange. The last section of this page labels all five.
Tolkien told an interviewer in 1968 that he wrote it on a blank page in an exam script he was marking for extra money, and that he knew nothing about the creature beyond the word. Note the ending: the book closes the sentence on “and that means comfort”. The 2012 film replaces that with a list of comforts, which is card 26.