You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?’ said Ginger, not paying him the least attention. ‘It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad ploughmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out.’

Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job.

Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.

Terry Pratchett

If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.

Terry Pratchett

Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

Terry Pratchett

There’s a rumour going around that I’ve found God. This is unlikely. I have enough difficulty finding my keys.

Terry Pratchett

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind.

Terry Pratchett

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Terry Pratchett

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it

Terry Pratchett, World Federation of the Right-to-Die Societies Congress, Zurich, 2012

Inspirations sleet through the universe continuously. Their destination, as if they cared, is the right mind in the place at the right time. They hit the right neuron, there’s a chain reaction, and a little while later someone is blinking foolishly in the TV lights and wondering how the hell he came up with the idea of pre-sliced bread in the first place.

Terry Pratchett, Men at arms

The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters.

Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

She knew about old money, wich was somehow hallowed by the fact that people had hung on to it for years, and she knew about new money, wich seemed to be made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the city these days. But under her powdered bosom she was an Ankh-Morpork shopkeeper, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in her hand rather than someone else’s. The best kind of money was mine, not yours.

Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong.

Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.

Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

No matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it’ll become a whole lot easier and wil therefore be done a lot. A huge mountain might be scaled by strong men only after many centuries of failed attempts, but a few decades later grandmothers will be strolling up it for tea and then wandering back afterwards to see where thy left their glasses.

Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

People remember badly. But societies remember well, the swarm remembers, encoding the information to slip it past the censors of the mind, passing it on from grandmother to grandchild in little bits of nonsense they won’t bother to forget. Sometimes the truth keeps itself alive in devious ways despite the best efforts of the official keepers of information.

Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from wich dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years’, thirty years’ ten years’ time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.

Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

The universe doesn’t much care if you tread on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies. Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don’t make any effort to catch them.

Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by the discovery of the bi-dimensional nature of Library-Space. The thaumic mathematics are complex, but boil down to the fact that all books, everywhere, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General Theory of L-Space suggest that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence.

Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

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

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

It is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

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.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

You meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. 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.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

After all, when you seek advice from someone it’s certainly not because you want them to give it. You just want them to be there while you talk to yourself.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer who first sets foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot home first. If it is still attached to his leg, this is a bonus.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.

Terry Pratchett, Interesting times

There was, he thought, probably something in the idea that there were only a few people in the world. There were lots of bodies, but only a few people. That’s why you kept running into the same ones. There was probably some mould somewhere.

Terry Pratchett, Interesting times

Human beings have always preferred common sense to logic.

Terry Pratchett, Interesting times

Chaos is found in greater abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

Terry Pratchett, Interesting times

It is said that whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It’s more interesting, and doesn’t take so long.

Terry Pratchett, Soul music

Be careful what you wish for. You never know who may be listening.

Terry Pratchett, Soul music

Space is not really big, it is simply something to be big in.

Terry Pratchett, The light fantastic

Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead.

Terry Pratchett, The light fantastic

He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry sabre-toothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying ‘What a magnificent brute!’ and ‘Here Pussy’.

Terry Pratchett, The light fantastic

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd sisters

It doesn’t take too many people to turn a worried, anxious crowd into a mob. A shout here, a shove there, something thrown here and with care every hesitant, nervous individual is being drawn into a majority that does not in fact exist.

Terry Pratchett, Thud

While all important enterprises need careful organization, it is the organization that needs organizing, rather than the enterprise.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the hart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Don’t trust the cannibal just ‘cos he’s using a knife and fork.

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

She was not, herself, hugely in favour of motherhood in general. Obviously it was necessary, but it wasn’t exactly difficult. Even cats managed it. But women acted as if they’d been given a medal that entitled them to boss people around. It was as if, just because they’d got the label wich said ‘mother’, everyone else got a tiny part of the label that said ‘child’.

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

The reward for toil had been more toil. If you dug the best ditches they gave you a bigger shovel.

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

Supposing there was justice for all, after all? for every enheeded beggar, every harsh word, every neglected duty, every slight… every choice… Because that was the point, wasn’t it? You had to choose. You might be right, you might be wrong, but you had to choose, knowing that the rightness or wrongness might never be clear or even that you were deciding between two sorts of wrong, that there was no right anywhere. And always, always, you did it by yourself.

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

Seek and you will find, but first you should know what you seek.

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

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

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of works and then you had the urge to pass it on.

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Down there are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

You think there are the good people and the bad people. You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

One of the things sometimes forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I’ll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I’m not as stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so that the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behoves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard… But no-one said anything. The cowards, each man thought.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they are progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

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

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, it at least should be organized crime.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Finding that you are dead is mitigated by also finding that there really is a you who can find you dead.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Because world all twisted up and wrong, like distorted glass, only came back into focus if you looked at it through bottom of bottle.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Big collections of books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.

Terry Pratchett, Going postal

Never promise to do the possible. Anyone could do the possible. You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimesthe impossible «was» possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it «had» been imposssible.

Terry Pratchett, Going postal

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

Terry Pratchett, Going postal

Craftsmen. D’you know whta that means? It means men with some pride, who get fed up and leave when they’re told to do skimpy work in a rush, no matter what you pay them. So I’m employing people as ‘craftsmen’ now who’re barely fit to sweep out a workshop. But you don’t care, because if they don’t polish a chair with their arse all day you think a man who’s done a seven-year apprenticeship is the same as some twerp who can’t be trusted to hold a hammer by the right end.

Terry Pratchett, Going postal

Before you could sell glass as diamonds you had to make people «really» want to see diamonds.

Terry Pratchett, Going postal

You see, I «believe» in freedom, Mr Lipwig. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete withouth the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon wich all the others are based.

Terry Pratchett, Going postal

People were strange like that. Steal five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either a government or a hero.

Terry Pratchett, Going postal

When heavy weights were balanced on the scales, the trick was to know where to place your thumb.

Terry Pratchett, The fifth elephant

The news that they have nothing to fear is guaranteed to strike terror into the hearts of innocents everywhere.

Terry Pratchett, The fifth elephant

You can find your average, amateur killers on every street. They’re mostly deranged or drunk or some poor woman who’s had a hard day and the husband has raised his hand once too often and suddenly twenty years of frustration takes over. Killing a stranger without malice or satisfaction, other than the craftsman’s pride in a job well done, is such a rare talent that armies spend months trying to instil it into their young soldiers. Most people will shy away from killing people they haven’t been introduced to.

Terry Pratchett, The fifth elephant

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

Terry Pratchett, The fifth elephant

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 at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. You worked away, patiently asking questions and looking hard at things. You walked and talked, and in your heart you just hoped like hell that some bugger’s nerve’d crack and he’d give himself up.

Terry Pratchett, Feet of clay

No one lived a completely blameless life. It might be just possible, by lying very still in a cellar somewhere, to get through a day without committing a crime. But only just. And, even then, you were probably guilty of loitering.

Terry Pratchett, Feet of clay

Wasp don’t complain too loudly when they’re stung.

Terry Pratchett, Feet of clay

They think they want good government and justice for all, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.

Terry Pratchett, Feet of clay

Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows -sometimes it doesn’t even need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.

Terry Pratchett, Feet of clay

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

Terry Pratchett

There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.

Terry Pratchett

I have no particular objection to people taking substances that make them feel better or more contented, or, for that matter, see little dancing purple fairies – or even their god if it comes to that. It’s their brain, after all, and society can have no claim on it, providing they’re not operating heavy machinery at the time.

Terry Pratchett, Snuff

There was always paperwork. It is well known that any drive to reduce paperwork only results in extra paperwork.

Terry Pratchett, Snuff

Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.

Terry Pratchett, The truth

People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things… well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.

Terry Pratchett, The truth

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: ‘What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!’ And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who has no glass at all, because they were at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.

Terry Pratchett, The truth

You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.

Terry Pratchett, Witches abroad

The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty wich is why they invent mercy.

Terry Pratchett, Witches abroad

It’s a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they’ll always seek that wisdom wich is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

Terry Pratchett, Witches abroad

People whose wishes get granted often don’t turn out to be very nice people.

Terry Pratchett, Witches abroad

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the begining of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling… Stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness. And the very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper. This is called te theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

Terry Pratchett, Witches abroad

Roads don’t necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start.

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd sisters

He was also one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time. Most people aren’t. They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is -anticipating the future, or holding onto the past. They’re usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it. Most people are like this. They learn how to fear because they can actually tell, down at the subconscious level, what is going to happen next. It’s already happening to them.

Terry Pratchett, Wyrd sisters

One of the first rules of running away is, never look back.

Terry Pratchett, Eric

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That’s because they’ve got the time-span all wrong.

From stone’s point of view the universe is hardly created and mountains ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backwards and forwards in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off.

It is going to be some time before stone notices its disfiguring little skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well.

Terry Pratchett, Equal rites

It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.

Terry Pratchett, Equal rites

Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp.

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. This frees the mind from unnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge wherever it matters. Your normal animal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.

The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things, around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts.

Terry Pratchett, Equal rites

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

Terry Pratchett, Equal rites

If you were worried about the price, then why were you in the shop?

Terry Pratchett, Equal rites