Top 500 Terry Pratchett Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “It’s no wonder most religions are born in the desert, because when men lay beneath that boundless night sky and look up at the infinite expanse of creation they have an uncontrollable urge to put something in the way .”

— Terry Pratchett

352. “It’s a god-eat-god world.”

— Terry Pratchett

353. “This was not a fairy-tale castle and there was no such thing as a fairy-tale ending, but sometimes you could threaten to kick the handsome prince in the ham-and-eggs.”

— Terry Pratchett

354. “Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.”

— Terry Pratchett

355. “Curiosity may have killed the cat, but her’s curiosity could have massacred a pride of lions.”

— Terry Pratchett

356. “Noble dragons don’t have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.”

— Terry Pratchett

357. “Most horses don’t walk backwards voluntarily, because what they can’t see doesn’t exist.”

— Terry Pratchett

358. “Its useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.”

— Terry Pratchett

359. “If my father could have sat up in bed and said goodbye, I’d have pressed the button. I wouldn’t have been able to see for crying, but I would have considered that a duty.”

— Terry Pratchett

360. “Just because someone’s a member of an ethnic minority doesn’t mean they’re not a nasty small-minded little jerk.”

— Terry Pratchett

361. “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.”

— Terry Pratchett

362. “Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.”

— Terry Pratchett

363. “Nanny Ogg could see the future in the froth on a beer mug. It invariably showed that she was going to enjoy a refreshing drink which she almost certainly was not going to pay for.”

— Terry Pratchett

364. “Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man!”

— Terry Pratchett

365. “I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.”

— Terry Pratchett

366. “Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.”

— Terry Pratchett

367. “The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I’m not sure about the turnip.”

— Terry Pratchett

368. “No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.”

— Terry Pratchett

369. “Every procedure for getting a cat to take a pill works fine – once. Like the Borg, they learn...”

— Terry Pratchett

370. “It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.”

— Terry Pratchett

371. “Not for the first time in the history of the universe, someone for whom communication normally came as effortlessly as a dream was stuck for inspiration when faced with a few lines on the back of a card.”

— Terry Pratchett

372. “Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything’s changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you’re going to live another few hours.”

— Terry Pratchett

373. “Making money isn’t something to be ashamed of. There’s a feeling now that if you have money you must have got it by some kind of shady dealing or being an MP.”

— Terry Pratchett

374. “Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.”

— Terry Pratchett

375. “The power of prayer and faith can heal and bring happiness. The real tragedy is that the people that are helped by this don’t realize that this power is really coming from within.”

— Terry Pratchett

376. “There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.”

— Terry Pratchett

377. “Whatever you choose, your choice will mean there are two new worlds. And perhaps sometimes, on the edge of sleep, we will see the shadow of the other world. There will be no unhappy memories.”

— Terry Pratchett

378. “My programming language was solder.”

— Terry Pratchett

379. “You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you?”

— Terry Pratchett

380. “It doesn’t matter if dragons are flying overhead or whatever – a lot of Victoriana is still cut in the frame of fantasy.”

— Terry Pratchett

381. “Some people believe that when you die, you cross the River of Death and have to pay the ferryman. People don’t seem to worry about that these days. Perhaps there’s a bridge now.”

— Terry Pratchett

382. “They can ta’k our lives but they can never ta’k our freedom!? Now there’s a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker.”

— Terry Pratchett

383. “Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.”

— Terry Pratchett

384. “Raise the stakes! Always push your luck because no one else would push it for you.”

— Terry Pratchett

385. “Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.”

— Terry Pratchett

386. “Lord Vetinari lifted an eyebrow with the care of one who, having found a piece of caterpillar in his salad, raises the rest of the lettuce.”

— Terry Pratchett

387. “I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.”

— Terry Pratchett

388. “The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.”

— Terry Pratchett

389. “His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn’t really happened and, if it had happened, hadn’t happened much.”

— Terry Pratchett

390. “You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?”

— Terry Pratchett

391. “Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I’m not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.”

— Terry Pratchett

392. “What can the harvest hope for...”

— Terry Pratchett

393. “Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.”

— Terry Pratchett

394. “You know how to pray, don’t you? Just put your hands together and hope.”

— Terry Pratchett

395. “Just because you’ve got a mind like a hammer doesn’t mean you have to treat everyone else like a nail.”

— Terry Pratchett

396. “There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.”

— Terry Pratchett

397. “It doesn’t matter how you live and die, it’s how the bards wrote it down.”

— Terry Pratchett

398. “Rincewind gave his fingers a long shocked stare, as one might regard a gun that has been hanging on the wall for decades and has suddenly gone off and perforated the cat.”

— Terry Pratchett

399. “As large as worlds. As old as Time. As patient as a brick.”

— Terry Pratchett

400. “There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.”

— Terry Pratchett