Top 500 Terry Pratchett Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it.”

— Terry Pratchett

202. “The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap and much more difficult to find.”

— Terry Pratchett

203. “Witches aren’t like that. We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.”

— Terry Pratchett

204. “They think written words are even more powerful,’ whispered the toad. ‘They think all writing is magic. Words worry them. See their swords? They glow blue in the presence of lawyers.”

— Terry Pratchett

205. “If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.”

— Terry Pratchett

206. “The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.”

— Terry Pratchett

207. “Gods play games with the fates of men. But first they have to get all the pieces on the board and look all over the place for the dice.”

— Terry Pratchett

208. “My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.”

— Terry Pratchett

209. “Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.”

— Terry Pratchett

210. “In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.”

— Terry Pratchett

211. “Few things are hidden from a quiet child with good eyesight.”

— Terry Pratchett

212. “Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.”

— Terry Pratchett

213. “When you stand between two mirrors you’re spread out among the images, your whole soul is pulled out thin, and somewhere in the distant images a dark part of you might get out and come looking for you, if you aren’t careful.”

— Terry Pratchett

214. “When I am old I shall wear midnight.”

— Terry Pratchett

215. “Most modern fantasy just rearranges the furniture in Tolkien’s attic.”

— Terry Pratchett

216. “The world is a globe – the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.”

— Terry Pratchett

217. “The mountains of madness have many little plateau of sanity.”

— Terry Pratchett

218. “All he knew was that you couldn’t hope to try for the big stuff, like world peace and happiness, but you might just about be able to achieve some tiny deed that’d make the world, in a small way, a better place. Like shooting someone.”

— Terry Pratchett

219. “The Auditors fluttered anxiously. And, as always happens in their species when something goes radically wrong and needs fixing instantly, they settled down to try to work how who was to blame.”

— Terry Pratchett

220. “He’s out of his depth on a wet pavement.”

— Terry Pratchett

221. “A good man will kill you with hardly a word.”

— Terry Pratchett

222. “I commend my soul to any god that can find it.”

— Terry Pratchett

223. “I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.”

— Terry Pratchett

224. “Demons were like genies or philosophy professors – if you didn’t word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers.”

— Terry Pratchett

225. “Happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.”

— Terry Pratchett

226. “Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.”

— Terry Pratchett

227. “Don’t be smart. Smart is only a polished version of dumb. Try intelligence. It will surely see you through.”

— Terry Pratchett

228. “I am death, not taxes. I turn up only once.”

— Terry Pratchett

229. “Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.”

— Terry Pratchett

230. “Science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on outside.”

— Terry Pratchett

231. “The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.”

— Terry Pratchett

232. “Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.”

— Terry Pratchett

233. “I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.”

— Terry Pratchett

234. “Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.”

— Terry Pratchett

235. “If you really want to upset a witch, do her a favor which she has no means of repaying. The unfulfilled obligation will nag at her like a hangnail.”

— Terry Pratchett

236. “Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don’t.”

— Terry Pratchett

237. “Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo.”

— Terry Pratchett

238. “Sometimes the only thing you could do for people was to be there.”

— Terry Pratchett

239. “When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth.”

— Terry Pratchett

240. “Witches were a bit like cats. They didn’t much like one another’s company, but they did like to know where all the other witches were, just in case they needed them.”

— Terry Pratchett

241. “I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.”

— Terry Pratchett

242. “Magic never dies. It merely fades away.”

— Terry Pratchett

243. “I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.”

— Terry Pratchett

244. “First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.”

— Terry Pratchett

245. “The significant owl hoots in the night.”

— Terry Pratchett

246. “I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It’s generally a better bet. There’s more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say “it was god’s will” when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.”

— Terry Pratchett

247. “Sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.”

— Terry Pratchett

248. “The price of being the best is having to be the best.”

— Terry Pratchett

249. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, if you ever find anything I wouldn’t do.”

— Terry Pratchett

250. “And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.”

— Terry Pratchett