Terry Pratchett Quotes

756 Sourced Quotes

You haven't heard of probability math? You, and tomorrow you become Chairman of the Board of Widdershinss and heir to riches untold? Then first we will talk, and then we will eat.

Terry Pratchett
Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.

Terry Pratchett
All holy piety in public, and all peeled grapes and self-indulgence in private.

Terry Pratchett
And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

Terry Pratchett
Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilised world ie, a world that can support historians

Terry Pratchett
The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got to the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities.

Terry Pratchett
The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.

Terry Pratchett
Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, 'It's indoor work with no heavy lifting, do you want to be a ploughman like your father?'

Terry Pratchett
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

Terry Pratchett
She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her. The Egregious Professor of Grammar and Usage would have corrected this to "she was not she," which would have caused the Professor of Logic to spit out his drink.

Terry Pratchett
A world like that, which exists only because the gods enjoy a joke, must be a place where magic can survive. And sex too, of course.

Terry Pratchett
You know I've never agreed with baths. Sittin' around in your own dirt like that.

Terry Pratchett
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards because a refusal often offends, I read somewhere.

Terry Pratchett
You see the lighted windows and what you want to think is that there may be many interesting stories behind them, but what you know is that really there are just dull, dull souls, mere consumers of food, who think their instincts are emotions and their tiny lives of more account than a whisper of wind.

Terry Pratchett
There's no point in killing an opponent... There's no triumph over a corpse, but a beaten opponent, who will remain beaten every day of the remainder of their sad and wretched life, is something to treasure.

Terry Pratchett
The thing about secrets is that they are usually best kept by just one person. That was the special thing about secrets. Some people seemed to think that the best way to keep a secret was to tell as many people as possible; what could possibly go wrong for a secret when there were so many people defending it?

Terry Pratchett
Knowing how bad you could be is a great encouragement to being good.

Terry Pratchett
Mort was hurt by this. It was one thing not to want to marry someone, but quite another to be told they didn't want to marry you.

Terry Pratchett
The Explosion removed the windows, the door and most of the chimney. It was the sort of thing you expected in the Street of Alchemists. The neighbors preferred explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up upon you.

Terry Pratchett
A Duke couldn't have the arse hanging out of his trousers when meeting foreign diplomats. Actually even plain old Sam Vimes never had the arse hanging out of his trousers, either, but no one would have actually started a war if he had.

Terry Pratchett
Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we'd be melting the bronze already.

Terry Pratchett
There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That's what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.

Terry Pratchett
Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.

Terry Pratchett
Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be

Terry Pratchett
Not for the first time in the history of the universe, someone for whom communication normally came as effortlessly as a dream was stuck for inspiration when faced with a few lines on the back of a card.

Terry Pratchett
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes.

Terry Pratchett
When your name is really and truly Percy Blakeney, pronounced 'Black-knee', and you still have bad acne in your twenties, you accept Pimple as a nickname and are grateful that it wasn't anything worse.

Terry Pratchett
The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedne ss.

Terry Pratchett
He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically

Terry Pratchett
Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

Terry Pratchett