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Terry Pratchett Quotes

Terry Pratchett quote from classy quote

Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Goodness Prayer

People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn't in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere. This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn't looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts' Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett God Humor Prayer Religion Satire

Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Humans Learning Weaponry Wolves

Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Hard Learning

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.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Darkness Light Speed Of Light

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

Terry Pratchett Bravery Light

Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no cap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. presumably, he said, these must be some elementary particles - kingons, or possibly queons - that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plan to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Light Philosophy Physics

These were dangerous thoughts, he knew. They were the kind that crept up on a Watchman when the chase was over and it was just you and him, facing one another in that breathless little pinch between the crime and the punishment.And maybe a Watchman had seen civilization with the skin ripped off one time too many and stopped acting like a Watchman and started acting like a normal human being and realized that the click of the crossbow or the sweep of the sword would make all the world so clean.And you couldn’t think like that, even about vampires. Even though they’d take the lives of other people because little lives don’t matter and what the hell can we take away from them?And, too, you couldn’t think like that because they gave you a sword and a badge and that turned you into something else and that had to mean there were some thoughts you couldn’t think.Only crimes could take place in darkness. Punishment had to be done in the light. That was the job of a good Watchman, Carrot always said. To light a candle in the dark.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Crime Light Punishment Terry Pratchett

If Vorbis was right, and there was a kind of light that made darkness visible, then down there was its opposite, the darkness where no light could ever reach: darkness that blackened light, He thought of blind Didactylos and his empty lantern.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Light Ruminations

After all, if you can't trust governments, whom can you trust?

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Governments Trust

She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?''I'm sorry,' she replied. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Grief Loss Magic Witchcraft

Tiffany thought of the little spot in the woods where Granny Weatherwax lay. Remembered. And knew that You had been right. Granny Weatherwax was indeed here. And there. She was, in fact, and always would be, everywhere.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Discworld Granny Weatherwax Loss

Tiffany found her mind filling up with an invisible gray mist, and in that thought there was nothing but grief. She could feel herself trying to push back time, but even the best witchcraft could not do that.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Discworld Grief Grief And Loss Loss Witches

The end of times? said Nanny. Look, Tiff, Esme tol' me to say, if you want to see Esmerelda Weatherwax, then just you look around. She is here. Us witches don't mourn for very long. We are satisfied with happy memories - they're there to be cherished.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Death Discworld Granny Weatherwax Grief

Death paused. YOU HAVE PERHAPS HEARD THE PHRASE, he said, THAT HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?‘Yes. Yes, of course.’Death nodded. IN TIME, he said, YOU WILL LEARN THAT IT IS WRONG.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Death Discworld Life Life Philosophy People Small Gods

We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends - but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compared with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word cosmopolitan we use it too lightly - it's flippant, it means we're galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don't comprehend. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Life Lessons Life Philosophy Thoughts On Life

We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends - but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compare with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word cosmopolitan we use it too lightly - it's flippant, it means we're galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don't comprehend. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Life Lessons Life Philosophy Thoughts On Life

Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Good And Evil Inspirational Life Philosophy Night Watch Terry Pratchett

Dullness. Only humans could have invented it. What imaginations they had.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Boredom Imagination

That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Curiosity Geology Humor Imagination Perspicacity Science Tiffany Aching Witches

Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Dragons Friends

It's an unfair world, Child. Be glad you have friends.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Friends

The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren’t so red and pointed, and their hair tended to flow more. But the Fool’s libido was bright enough to tell the difference between the impossible and the conceivably attainable, and hurriedly cut in some filter circuits.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Humor Love Men Women

You didn’t warn us about this, Readier,’ said Stowley resentfully.Gilt waved his hands. ‘We must speculate to accumulate!’ he said. ‘The Post Office? Trickery and sleight of hand. Oh, von Lipwig is an ideas man, but that’s all he is. He’s made a splash, but he’s not got the stamina for the long haul. Yet as it turns out he will do us a favour. Perhaps we have been . . . a little smug, a little lax, but we have learned our lesson! Spurred by the competition we are investing several hundred thousand dollars—’‘Several hundred?’ said Greenyham.Gilt waved him into silence, and continued: ‘—several hundred thousand dollars in a challenging, relevant and exciting systemic overhaul of our entire organization, focusing on our core competencies while maintaining full and listening co-operation with the communities we are proud to serve. We fully realize that our energetic attempts to mobilize the flawed infrastructure we inherited have been less than totally satisfactory, and hope and trust that our valued and loyal customers will bear with us in the coming months as we interact synergistically with change management in our striving for excellence. That is our mission.’An awed silence followed.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Business Customers Marketing Swindle

The coach passed by many buildings of this sort, which would no doubt be little palaces to the occupants, who had escaped from Cockbill Street and Pigsty Hill and all the other neighbourhoods where people still dreamed that they could ‘better themselves’, an achievement that might be attained, oh happy day, when they had ‘a little place of their own’. It was an inspiring dream, if you didn’t look too deeply into words like mortgage and repayments and repossession and bankruptcy, and the lower middle classes of Ankh-Morpork, who saw themselves as being trodden on by the class above and illegally robbed by the one below, lined up with borrowed money to purchase, by instalments, their own little Oi Dong

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Dream

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Hippo Humor Memory Metaphor Recollection

It's still magic even if you know how it's done.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic Technology

We've strayed into a zone with a high magical index,' he said. 'Don't ask me how. Once upon a time a really powerful magic field must have been generated here, and we're feeling the after-effects.'Precisely,' said a passing bush.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic

It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic

That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic

What is magic?There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic Wizards

Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic

Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic University Wizard

It took place in the midnight in the University's Great Hall, in a welter of incense, candlesticks, runic inscriptions and magic circles, none of which was strictly necessary but which made the wizards feel better.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Eric Magic

Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic

... darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simplyits absence, and what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side ofdarkness, the light fantastic.It was a rather disappointing purple colour.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Humor Magic

Haven’t you got any romance in your soul?’ said Magrat plaintively. ‘No,’ said Granny. 'I ain’t. And stars don’t care what you wish, and magic don’t make things better, and no one doesn’t get burned who sticks their hand in a fire. If you want to amount to anything as a witch, Magrat Garlick, you got to learn three things. What’s real, what’s not real, and what’s the difference.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Granny Weatherwax Magic Magrat Romance Star Wish

Time travel was only a kind of magic, after all. That's why it always went wrong.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic Time

Look at it like this, it's not that we're making life, we're simply giving life a place to live.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Life Magic

It's witchcraft with all the crusts cut off, and real witchcraft is ALL crusts.

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Magic Witchcraft
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