Terry Pratchett Quotes

756 Sourced Quotes

There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.

Terry Pratchett
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Terry Pratchett
What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

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

Terry Pratchett
I'm trying to have a moment o' existential dreed here, right? Crivens, it's a puir lookout if a man canna feel the chilly winds o' fate lashing aroound his netheres wi'out folks telling him he's deid, eh?

Terry Pratchett
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Terry Pratchett
The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them...

Terry Pratchett
Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.

Terry Pratchett
The food was good solid stuff for a cold morning, all calories and fat and protein and maybe a vitamin crying softly because it was all alone.

Terry Pratchett
The most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendents not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships, or being patronised by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it.

Terry Pratchett
There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.

Terry Pratchett
But I think you have a right to know what it is you're not being told.

Terry Pratchett
He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors - and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only too easy to imagine...

Terry Pratchett
Sergeant Colon of the Ankh-Morpork City Guard was on duty. He was guarding the Brass Bridge, the main link between Ankh and Morpork. From theft. When it came to crime prevention, Sergeant Colon found it safest to think big.

Terry Pratchett
Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.

Terry Pratchett
The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.

Terry Pratchett
Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight.

Terry Pratchett
Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.

Terry Pratchett
'But we should kill him!'
'No. You've been listen to Brocando too often,' said Bane.
Brocando bristled. 'You know what he is! Why not kill—' he began, but he was interrupted.
'Because it doesn't matter what he is. It matters what we are.'

Terry Pratchett
Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

Terry Pratchett
Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

Terry Pratchett
She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

Terry Pratchett
It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?

Terry Pratchett
In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.

Terry Pratchett
The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then.

Terry Pratchett