Top 300 Philip Pullman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

— Philip Pullman

Featured in: Short Inspiring Quotes, Meaningful Quotes, Quotes About Writing, Storytelling Quotes, Quotes About Humanity

2. “Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.”

— Philip Pullman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”

— Philip Pullman

4. “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.”

— Philip Pullman

5. “Iorek Byrnison: Can is not the same as must. Lyra Silvertongue: But if you must and you can, then there’s no excuse.”

— Philip Pullman

6. “We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us, there is no elsewhere.”

— Philip Pullman

7. “People are too complicated to have simple labels.”

— Philip Pullman

8. “Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.”

— Philip Pullman

9. “Tell them stories.”

— Philip Pullman

10. “We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”

— Philip Pullman

Featured in: Rights Quotes

11. “It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.”

— Philip Pullman

12. “Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”

— Philip Pullman

13. “So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.”

— Philip Pullman

14. “True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.”

— Philip Pullman

15. “If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you’re willing to risk failure.”

— Philip Pullman

16. “Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.”

— Philip Pullman

17. “The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it’s the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.”

— Philip Pullman

18. “You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”

— Philip Pullman

19. “Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.”

— Philip Pullman

20. “What is worth having is worth working for.”

— Philip Pullman

21. “We have to learn everything we do.”

— Philip Pullman

22. “You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.”

— Philip Pullman

23. “You don’t win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.”

— Philip Pullman

24. “Imagination is a form of seeing.”

— Philip Pullman

25. “Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.”

— Philip Pullman

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

26. “We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.”

— Philip Pullman

27. “Everything means something.”

— Philip Pullman

28. “All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”

— Philip Pullman

29. “The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.”

— Philip Pullman

30. “Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don’t try and shut it out.”

— Philip Pullman

31. “Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it. That’s original sin. And I’m going to destroy it. Death is going to die.”

— Philip Pullman

32. “Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.”

— Philip Pullman

33. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

— Philip Pullman

34. “I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.”

— Philip Pullman

35. “I’m for open-mindedness and tolerance. I’m against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of ‘We have the truth.’ The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.”

— Philip Pullman

36. “A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they’re not inspired as when they are.”

— Philip Pullman

37. “Once upon a time lasts forever.”

— Philip Pullman

38. “Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn’t sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I’m doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that.”

— Philip Pullman

39. “It’s only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.”

— Philip Pullman

40. “It’s like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can’t do is choose neither.”

— Philip Pullman

41. “There is another consequence of any belief in a single god, and that is that it is a very good excuse for people to behave very badly.”

— Philip Pullman

42. “And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?”

— Philip Pullman

43. “If you can’t think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway.”

— Philip Pullman

44. “Tell him, we are not devils but we have friends who are.”

— Philip Pullman

45. “Maybe sometimes we don’t do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don’t want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it’s dangerous. We’re more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.”

— Philip Pullman

46. “From what we are, spirit; from what we do, matter. Matter and spirit are one.”

— Philip Pullman

47. “I don’t know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I’m not there, they go away again.”

— Philip Pullman

48. “Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself.”

— Philip Pullman

49. “Lonely? I don’t know. They tell me this is cold. I don’t know what cold is, because I don’t freeze. So I don’t know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.”

— Philip Pullman

50. “I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”

— Philip Pullman