Top 500 Terry Pratchett Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.”

— Terry Pratchett

252. “Stand before your god, bow before your king, kneel before your man.”

— Terry Pratchett

253. “One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.”

— Terry Pratchett

254. “We live in a science fiction universe. We have done for a long time.”

— Terry Pratchett

255. “Now that their long war was over, they could get on with the proper concern of all civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.”

— Terry Pratchett

256. “The reaper does not listen to the harvest.”

— Terry Pratchett

257. “This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.”

— Terry Pratchett

258. “Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.”

— Terry Pratchett

259. “The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.”

— Terry Pratchett

260. “Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”

— Terry Pratchett

261. “I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.”

— Terry Pratchett

262. “And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it’s gone.”

— Terry Pratchett

263. “Remember – that which does not kill us can only make us stronger. And that which does kill us leaves us dead!”

— Terry Pratchett

264. “Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant ’idiot.”

— Terry Pratchett

265. “You can’t second-guess ineffability, I always say.”

— Terry Pratchett

266. “This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.”

— Terry Pratchett

267. “Good or bad, do it as you. Too many lies and there’s no truth to go back to.”

— Terry Pratchett

268. “Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more then Heaven, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.”

— Terry Pratchett

269. “We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.”

— Terry Pratchett

270. “Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories.”

— Terry Pratchett

271. “People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.”

— Terry Pratchett

272. “Ninety percent of true love is acute, ear-burning embarrassment.”

— Terry Pratchett

273. “I’ve seen excitement, and I’ve seen boredom. And boredom was best.”

— Terry Pratchett

274. “But that was just it – hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.”

— Terry Pratchett

275. “The fastest way to travel is to be there already.”

— Terry Pratchett

276. “You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don’t die can’t live. What don’t live can’t change. What don’t change can’t learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you.”

— Terry Pratchett

277. “He said it was better to belong where you don’t belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there.”

— Terry Pratchett

278. “Building a temple didn’t mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.”

— Terry Pratchett

279. “I tell you, commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.”

— Terry Pratchett

280. “The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.”

— Terry Pratchett

281. “His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.”

— Terry Pratchett

282. “Nanny’s philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.”

— Terry Pratchett

283. “Because some stories end, but old stories go on, and you gotta dance to the music if you want to stay ahead.”

— Terry Pratchett

284. “The jurisdiction of a good man extends to the end of the world.”

— Terry Pratchett

285. “You can’t inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol.”

— Terry Pratchett

286. “First of all you are a writer, a writer is what you are, so it doesn’t actually stop the moment you leave your desk, your computer, your keyboard, whatever. Something is operating the back of your mind.”

— Terry Pratchett

287. “He’d heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns drinking champagne. This is, of course, absolutely true.”

— Terry Pratchett

288. “I wouldn’t trust you with a bucket of water if my knickers were on fire!”

— Terry Pratchett

289. “It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.”

— Terry Pratchett

290. “I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.”

— Terry Pratchett

291. “Quick, someone’s coming! Look real!”

— Terry Pratchett

292. “Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.”

— Terry Pratchett

293. “I don’t really plan. I’m almost intuitive about things.”

— Terry Pratchett

294. “Theres no stink more sorrorful than the stink of wet, burnt paper. It means: the end.”

— Terry Pratchett

295. “Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.”

— Terry Pratchett

296. “Everyone’s heard of Erwin Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.”

— Terry Pratchett

297. “There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That’s what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.”

— Terry Pratchett

298. “Fascism may be good at making the trains run on time, but you wouldn’t like some of the destinations.”

— Terry Pratchett

299. “Either all days are holy or none are.”

— Terry Pratchett

300. “He felt as if he had been shipwrecked on the Titanic, but in the nick of time had been rescued. By the Lusitania.”

— Terry Pratchett