Terry Pratchett Quotes

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

Even though I'm an actor, even though I know a little bit about film, I very much view things as an audience member. For me, whether it's TV, film, theater, whatever, it's a big movie, a small movie, whatever it is, I look for the truth in it. I look for the honesty. I just look for if it feels honest and real to me.

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

Candor compels me to admit that I have no conclusive research to support my view that jingles are less persuasive than the spoken word. You'd run like hell if a salesman came to your door and began singing at you. Why do it in advertising?

In the Orient the ultimate divine mystery is sought beyond all human categories of thought and feeling, beyond names and forms, and absolutely beyond any such concept as of a merciful or wrathful personality, chooser of one people over another, comforter of folk who pray, and destroyer of those who do not. Such anthropomorphic attributions of human sentiments and thoughts to a mystery beyond thought is-from the point of view of Indian thought-a style of religion for children.

I view cats as more like wild animals. We feed it, but a lot of times it's not eating the food because it's murdering other animals outside and eating their meat.

Keep out of your mind, and out of your office, and out of your world, every element that seeks admittance with no definite, helpful, useful end in view.

The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it.

Don't confuse my point of view with cynicism. The real cynics are the ones who tell you that everything's gonna be all right.

I've sought a constructive relationship with Russia, but what I have also been is realistic in recognizing that there is some significant differences in how Russia views the world and how we view the world.

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

If I can't find a cat, I stop and quiet my mind, not yelling the cat's name, and focus on connecting with the cat and then I get the message and go to that room or outside door and find the cat.

But I simply can't stand a view limited to this earth, I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds...I like mathematics largely because it is not human.

If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.

The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.

Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.

Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge—the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.

It may here be observed, that all who are offended by us are exposed to our view. But the rich man sees Lazarus not with any other righteous man, but in Abraham's bosom. For Abraham was full of love, but the man is convicted of cruelty. Abraham sitting before his door followed after those that passed by, and brought them into his house, the other turned away even them that abode within his gate.

If I don't have to act, I'd rather not. I'd rather not act cold. I'd rather actually be cold. That's my weird way of acting. If the door is supposed to be locked, I'd rather have it locked. But of course, most of the time, we have to act, and that's okay, too.

There is a hearty Puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787. It is the work of men who believed in original sin, and were resolved to leave open for transgressors no door which they could possibly shut.

Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you're trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.

Abstract thinking leads to greater creativity... But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view.

He [the cat] liked to peep into the refrigerator and risk having his head shut in by the closing door. He also climbed to the top of the stove, discontinuing the practice after he singed his tail.

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.