Terry Pratchett Quotes

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

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.

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

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.

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. 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. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned by no later than the date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

There's a door." "Where does it go?" "It stays where it is, I think.

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

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

He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.

Of course I'm sane, when trees start talking to me, I don't talk back.

The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.

...and the funny thing was that people who weren't entirely certain they were right always argued much louder than other people, as if the main person they were trying to convince were themselves.

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

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

William: I'm sure we can all pull together, sir.Vetinari: Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.

He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking.

He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter.

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'

Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant ‘idiot.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course.

Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.