Quotes by
Terry Pratchett |
1948-2015 , British writer
English humorist, satirist, and author of fantasy novels, especially comical works, most famous for his Discworld series. | 94 quotes | 3,867 visits |
Quotations
| • | The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head. 12 |
| • | So much universe, and so little time. 10 |
| • | If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember. 9 |
| • | You get a wonderful view from the point of no return. 6 |
| • | Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think. 6 |
| • | Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom. 6 |
| • | The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it. 6 |
| • | Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages. 6 |
| • | The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to. 5 |
| • | I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel. 5 |
| • | I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it. 5 |
| • | In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. 5 |
| • | A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him? 5 |
| • | Sometimes I really think people ought to have to pass a proper exam before they're allowed to be parents. Not just the practical, I mean. 4 |
| • | Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people. 2 |
| • | Oh, come on. Revelation was a mushroom dream that belonged in the Apocrypha. The New Testament is basically about what happened when God got religion. 2 |
| • | Imagination, not intelligence, made us human. 2 |
| • | Every step is a first step if it’s a step in the right direction. 1 |
| • | The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated. 1 |
| • | It was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying. 1 |
| • | If you stopped tellin’ people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. 1 |
| • | I’ve seen excitement, and I’ve seen boredom. And boredom was best. 1 |
| • | Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself. 1 |
| • | Cats gravitate to kitchens like rocks gravitate to gravity. 1 |
| • | Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it. 1 |
| • | Even our fears make us feel important, because we fear we might not be. 1 |
| • | The world is a globe — the farther you sail, the closer to home you are. 1 |
| • | It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them. 1 |
| • | A weapon you held and didn't know how to use belonged to your enemy. 1 |
| • | I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of. 1 |
| • | The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, “What about me?” and you can just hear the universe replying, “Well, what about you?” 1 |
| • | Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel--merely terribly, terribly good at his job. 1 |
| • | Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is. 1 |
| • | The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication. 1 |
| • | He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one. 1 |
| • | Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show. 1 |
| • | Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive. 1 |
| • | You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more. It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons. 1 |
| • | Knowing things is magical, if other people don’t know them. 1 |
| • | Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time. 1 |
| • | I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides. 1 |
| • | The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo. 1 |
| • | I commend my soul to any god that can find it. 1 |
| • | Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to. 1 |
| • | A good plan isn't one where someone wins, it's where nobody thinks they've lost. 1 |
| • | No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk. 1 |
| • | Progress just means bad things happen faster. 1 |
| • | Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more. 1 |
| • | People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked. 1 |
| • | The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks. 1 |
| • | Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized. 1 |
| • | The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. 1 |
| • | Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove. 1 |
| • | This book was written using 100% recycled words. 1 |
| • | Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on. 1 |
| • | Death: “THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT.” Albert: “Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.” 1 |
| • | She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close. 1 |
| • | Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken. 1 |
| • | Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time. 1 |
| • | Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you. 1 |
| • | Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. 1 |
| • | It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life. 1 |
| • | Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life. 1 |
| • | Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things. 1 |
| • | There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this. 1 |
| • | If you trust in yourself.... and believe in your dreams.... and follow your star... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | And what would humans be without love?' RARE, said Death. 1 |
| • | Freedom without limits is just a word. 1 |
| • | You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake. 1 |
| • | It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing. 1 |
| • | They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. 1 |
| • | I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist. 1 |
| • | The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. 1 |
| • | It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. 1 |
| • | Most armies are in fact run by their sergeants — the officers are there just to give things a bit of tone and prevent warfare from becoming a mere lower-class brawl. 1 |
| • | Anyway, just because you're sworn enemies doesn't mean you can't be friends, does it? 1 |
| • | Keep ‘em busy. That was one of the three rules of being chief that old Grimm had passed on to him. Act confidently, never say “I don’t know,” and when all else fails, keep ‘em busy. 1 |
| • | This book had two authors, and they were both the same person. 1 |
| • | Oh dear, I'm feeling political today. It's just that it’s dawned on me that “zero tolerance” only seems to mean putting extra police in poor, run-down areas, and not in the Stock Exchange. 1 |
| • | Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds. 1 |
| • | We are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was. 1 |
| • | In ancient times, cats were worshiped as gods. They have never forgotten this. 1 |
| • | Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one. 1 |
Funny Quotes
| • | Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. 17 |
| • | Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. 10 |
| • | It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing. 4 |
| • | Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. 4 |
| • | He’s out of his depth on a wet pavement. 1 |
| • | A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores. 1 |
| • | Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw. 1 |
| • | His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools – the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans – and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, “You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.” 1 |
| • | He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower. 1 |
| • | Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page. 1 |
