Top 500 Terry Pratchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.”

— Terry Pratchett

102. “Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn’t the kind of person who ever became lost. It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn’t know the position of anywhere else.”

— Terry Pratchett

103. “The enemy isn’t men, or women, it’s bloody stupid people and no-one has the right to be stupid.”

— Terry Pratchett

104. “Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.”

— Terry Pratchett

105. “If I were you, I’d sue my face for slander.”

— Terry Pratchett

106. “Divide by cucumber error. Please reinstall universe and reboot.”

— Terry Pratchett

107. “The sun set, which is everyday magic...”

— Terry Pratchett

108. “Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.”

— Terry Pratchett

109. “Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate...”

— Terry Pratchett

110. “The worst thing you can do is nothing.”

— Terry Pratchett

111. “I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”

— Terry Pratchett

112. “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.”

— Terry Pratchett

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

— Terry Pratchett

114. “Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.”

— Terry Pratchett

115. “Vimes had got around to a Clean Desk policy. It was a Clean Floor strategy that eluded him at the moment.”

— Terry Pratchett

116. “We are monkeys. We like to chatter. Chattering doesn’t cost us anything.”

— Terry Pratchett

117. “Progress just means bad things happen faster.”

— Terry Pratchett

118. “It wasn’t that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence.”

— Terry Pratchett

119. “There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.”

— Terry Pratchett

120. “It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as “slightly foxed”, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had beed badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well. – Ah, but has it been hedgehogged?”

— Terry Pratchett

121. “And Sam Vimes thought: Why is Young Sam’s nursery full of farmyard animals anyway? Why are his books full of moo-cows and baa-lambs? He is growing up in the city. He will only see them on a plate! They go sizzle!”

— Terry Pratchett

122. “In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”

— Terry Pratchett

123. “Sometimes, the best answer is a more interesting question.”

— Terry Pratchett

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

— Terry Pratchett

125. “The turtle moves.”

— Terry Pratchett

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

— Terry Pratchett

127. “Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.”

— Terry Pratchett

128. “Why bother with a cunning plan when a simple one will do?”

— Terry Pratchett

129. “If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember.”

— Terry Pratchett

130. “But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions.”

— Terry Pratchett

131. “Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.”

— Terry Pratchett

132. “When you break rules, break ’em good and hard.”

— Terry Pratchett

133. “He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting ‘All the Gods are bastards.’”

— Terry Pratchett

134. “Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.”

— Terry Pratchett

135. “There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.”

— Terry Pratchett

136. “People aren’t just people, they are people surrounded by circumstances.”

— Terry Pratchett

137. “I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.”

— Terry Pratchett

138. “And the new day was a great big fish.”

— Terry Pratchett

139. “Luck is my middle name. Mind you, my first name is Bad.”

— Terry Pratchett

140. “It’s lies. It’s all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that’s all. People see what they think is there.”

— Terry Pratchett

141. “Strength enough to build a home, Time enough to hold a child, Love enough to break a heart.”

— Terry Pratchett

142. “Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.”

— Terry Pratchett

143. “She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.”

— Terry Pratchett

144. “Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”

— Terry Pratchett

145. “Susan says, don’t get afraid, get angry.”

— Terry Pratchett

146. “There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.”

— Terry Pratchett

147. “As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.”

— Terry Pratchett

148. “The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.”

— Terry Pratchett

149. “The librarians were mysterious. It was said they could tell what book you needed just by looking at you, and they could take your voice away with a word.”

— Terry Pratchett

150. “Real education happens when you pick up a fact here, and another fact there, and put them together and get an insight.”

— Terry Pratchett