Terry Pratchett Quotes

756 Sourced Quotes

The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest.

Terry Pratchett
Sometimes the only thing you could do for people was to be there.

Terry Pratchett
I can't pretend to understand probability math. But if the universe is so ordered, so — immutable — that the future can be told by a handful of numbers, then why need we go on living?

Terry Pratchett
The sign, which says: "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door!" - Of course, I've read it. Why do you think I want it opened?.. To see why they wanted it shut, of course. This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.

Terry Pratchett
Correct observation followed by meticulous deduction and the precise visualization of goals is vital to the success of any enterprise.

Terry Pratchett
The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain -- the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn.

Terry Pratchett
You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all...

Terry Pratchett
Classically, very few people have considered that cleanliness is next to godliness. A rank loincloth and hair in an advanced state of matted entanglement have generally been the badges of office of prophets whose injunction to disdain earthly things starts with soap.

Terry Pratchett
One of the recurring philosophical questions is: 'Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?' Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in a forest. It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards, but someone.

Terry Pratchett
People are content to wait a long time for salvation, but prefer dinner to turn up inside an hour.

Terry Pratchett
There are, almost by definition, an unlimited number of Hells - potentially at least a personal one for every living sapient being.

Terry Pratchett
The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.

Terry Pratchett
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye.

Terry Pratchett
Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

Terry Pratchett
When it's time to stop living, I will certainly make Death my number one choice!

Terry Pratchett
The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.

Terry Pratchett
No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.

Terry Pratchett
Remember - that which does not kill us can only make us stronger. And that which does kill us leaves us dead!

Terry Pratchett
It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military maneuvers, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.

Terry Pratchett
Magicians and scientists are, on the face of it, poles apart. Certainly, a group of people who often dress strangely, live in a world of their own, speak a specialized language and frequently make statements that appear to be in flagrant breach of common sense have nothing in common with a group of people who often dress strangely, speak a specialized language, live in... er...

Terry Pratchett
I express preference for a chronological sequence of events which precludes a violence.

Terry Pratchett
The man gave a shrug which indicated that, although the world did indeed have many problems, this was one of them that was not his.

Terry Pratchett
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

Terry Pratchett
Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot him and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?

Terry Pratchett
It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always lost. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.

Terry Pratchett
I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf, And me an' my friends can walk towards you with our hats on backwards in a menacing way, Yo!

Terry Pratchett
Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination.

Terry Pratchett
Picturesque meant - he decided after careful observation of the scenerey that inspired Twoflower to use the word - that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown. Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, mean 'idiot'.

Terry Pratchett
In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the
cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat
could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

Terry Pratchett
Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point MY POINT EXACTLY.

Terry Pratchett