Quotes by Terry Pratchett

And a woman by herself is missing a man, while a man by himself is his own master. Trousers. Thats the secret. Trousers and a pair of socks. I never dreamed it was like this. Put on trousers and the world changes. We walk different. We act different. I see these girls and I think: Idiots Get yourself some trousers!

Handle with care. Probably has Views. Do not attempt to kiss hand.

High magic requires a great clarity of thought, you see, and womens talents do not lie in that direction. Their brains tend to overheat.

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Thats old Twoflower, Rincewind thought. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect.

The trouble is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.

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

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and y

As far as he could see, the drawings were simply alive. They might be colored earth on rock, but they were as alive as the kangaroo thatd just hopped away.

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease, and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in.

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

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

His granny taught him to read, see. I reckon it overheated his mind.

He was stupid, yes, in the particular way that very clever people can be stupid.

You wanted magic, watch. She put her hand into the struggling mass of insects and made a shrill faint piping noise in the back of her throat. There was a movement in the mass, and a large bee lander and flatter then the others crawled onto her hand. A few workers followed it stroking it and generally ministering to it.How did you do that said Esk.Ahhh, said Granny, wouldnt you like to know.Yes I would thats why I asked Granny, said Esk severely.Do you think I used magic, Esk looked down at the queen bee, then up at the witch.No, I think you just know a lot about bees.Granny grinned, Exactly correct, thats one form of magic of course.What just knowing things.Knowing things that other people dont know, said Granny

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We cant possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

Inside every sane person theres a madman struggling to get out, said the shopkeeper. Thats what Ive always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (wise man). In any case its an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

And just when you’d think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they occasionally showed more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of.