Terry Pratchett Quotes

I always find you go back to an animal; it will always show you the sort of primal aspects of behavior. You always know how to respond if you choose that.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

Every animal is providentially directed to the use of its proper weapon.

Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation, its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the the air and in the sea. There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man. He has entered into the strange world of history.

I don't use machines - animals don't use machines.

First be a good animal.

There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.

Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and... reproduction.

The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

We lost this animal instinct that we used to have. We use a very low percentage of our instinct.

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

I approach my character with the question: What would an animal think? How would an animal respond? A lot of times, it's quick action and no fear, and sometimes it's irrational fear. You don't always know.

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we think that we have free will and that our behavior can't be described by some mechanistic set of theorems or ideas. But even in terms of much of our behavior, we really aren't very different from other animals.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

Everybody wants a solution on how to help their dogs, but we can't really see the problem until we reconnect ourselves to our instinctual self.

We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain.

The first inclination which an animal has is to protect itself

Many expressions of a cat's feelings seem deeply related to the capture of live prey.

Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals

I hunt deer because they aren't capable of higher forms of thinking. All they care about is, 'What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away'. They are very much like the French in that way.

The idea of the nest in the bird's mind, where does it come from?

Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.