Terry Pratchett Quotes

If I had to imagine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent power in the universe that chose to make my mother suffer, I don't know how I would make that make sense in the universe.

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.

Some people turn from God because they cannot understand how a good God can permit evil in the world.

It is very difficult to give a 15 second sound bite on why there is pain and suffering in this world and not have it come off as being flippant or surface level or superficial.

Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

I see that a lot in my own life and in the lives of others.Does the presence of pain mean the absence of God?

I believe for God not to allow pain to happen in the world is for Him to extract free will from the world.

God knows life sucks. It's right there in the Bible. The book of Job is all about Job asking God to take away pain and misery. And God says, "I can't take away pain and misery because then no one would talk to me."

If the whole world is evil, then the tragedy that befell you is justified," she went on. "That would make it easier for you to accept the deaths of your wife and daughters. But if good people do exist, then, however much you deny it, your life will be unbearable; because fate set a trap for you, and you know you didn't deserve it. It isn't the light you want to recover, it's the certainty that there is only darkness.

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

I believe pain is nature's way of saying, 'You're still alive, and life sucks.'

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

Suffering always prompts heart-wrenching questions: if God is good, why would He allow this pain in my life? Is God truly sovereign over accidents and birth anomalies, or does the devil set the world's agenda? How do I counsel people who are despairing of their condition?

I myself will perhaps cry out with all the rest, looking at the mother embracing her child's tormentor: 'Just art thou, O Lord!' but I do not want to cry out with them. While there's still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears!

If there are gods, why is the world so full of pain and injustice?' 'Because of men like you.

If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe - all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary - evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe - just maybe - if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover.

I'm a pretty solid Christian. But even as an altar boy, I was always asking the bigger questions--you know: if God is, in fact, good, what is all this death I see? And if God is gentle, what is all this suffering I see? I've found some of the answers in Eastern religion. It explained my Christianity to me. Good and evil are the same thing. You can't have one without the other. It's the balance, it's the temperance of things.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.