Top 500 Terry Pratchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air.”

— Terry Pratchett

305. “Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea.”

— Terry Pratchett

306. “They didn’t know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you’ve got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you’re alive, when you really shouldn’t be.”

— Terry Pratchett

307. “Look, that’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.”

— Terry Pratchett

308. “The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.”

— Terry Pratchett

309. “The Librarian was not familiar with love, which had always struck him as a bit ethereal and soppy, but kindness, on the other hand, was practical. You knew where you were with kindness, especially if you were holding a pie it had just given you.”

— Terry Pratchett

310. “Granny Weatherwax was not a good loser. From her point of view, losing was something that happened to other people.”

— Terry Pratchett

311. “Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn’t see why anyone else should.”

— Terry Pratchett

312. “In the end the problem isn’t that you have the wrong sort of government for the People, but that you have the wrong sort of People.”

— Terry Pratchett

313. “The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.”

— Terry Pratchett

314. “And never resist a perfect moment.”

— Terry Pratchett

315. “Don’t stick your nose where someone can pull it off and eat it.”

— Terry Pratchett

316. “Either dragons should exist completely or fail to exist at all, he felt. A dragon only half-existing was worse than the extremes.”

— Terry Pratchett

317. “The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.”

— Terry Pratchett

318. “There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”

— Terry Pratchett

319. “See a pin and pick it up, and, all day long, you’ll have a pin.”

— Terry Pratchett

320. “If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged.”

— Terry Pratchett

321. “There are all kinds of darkness, and all kinds of things can be found in them, imprisoned, banished, lost or hidden. Sometimes they escape. Sometimes they simply fall out. Sometimes they just can’t take it any more.”

— Terry Pratchett

322. “When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry.”

— Terry Pratchett

323. “Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already.”

— Terry Pratchett

324. “Correct observation followed by meticulous deduction and the precise visualization of goals is vital to the success of any enterprise.”

— Terry Pratchett

325. “It is a mistake trying to cheer up camels. You may as well drop meringues into a black hole.”

— Terry Pratchett

326. “Some people think this is paranoia, but it isn’t. Paranoids only think everyone is out to get them. Wizards know it.”

— Terry Pratchett

327. “Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.”

— Terry Pratchett

328. “No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable.”

— Terry Pratchett

329. “Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.”

— Terry Pratchett

330. “Many an ancient lord’s last words have been, ‘You can’t kill me because I’ve got magic aaargh.’”

— Terry Pratchett

331. “There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”

— Terry Pratchett

332. “You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn’t, he sent men to come and take it away.”

— Terry Pratchett

333. “Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn’t do good for people, she did right by them.”

— Terry Pratchett

334. “Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.”

— Terry Pratchett

335. “Well, it would have to be “The Man Who Was Thursday.” It’s a damn good read that I believe should be read by everyone in politics.”

— Terry Pratchett

336. “I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.”

— Terry Pratchett

337. “There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; ocassionally, however, there are alternate pasts.”

— Terry Pratchett

338. “Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.”

— Terry Pratchett

339. “The Captain of the Watch says if you’re still in the City by sunrise he will personally have you buried alive.”

— Terry Pratchett

340. “Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.”

— Terry Pratchett

341. “One of the things 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

342. “At least I know I’m bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.”

— Terry Pratchett

343. “I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.”

— Terry Pratchett

344. “Needless to say, they refused to submit to the Empire, conducting such a persistent guerrilla war that the Romans gave up hope of conquering Scotland, and the Wee Free Men remained both wee and free.”

— Terry Pratchett

345. “What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?”

— Terry Pratchett

346. “There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.”

— Terry Pratchett

347. “I don’t think it’s weak to admit you made a mistake. That takes strength, if you ask me.”

— Terry Pratchett

348. “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

349. “I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce.”

— Terry Pratchett

350. “This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world. And Fate always wins.”

— Terry Pratchett