Terry Pratchett Quotes

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

… a world without certainty can be richer, in all senses of the word, than a world with false convictions.

There are no sure answers, only better questions.

Anything can happen, and you have to be able to understand the reality of the world that we live in.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.

When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

The world is complicated and full of grays, but there's still truth there to be found.

I love being able to stay real to the world.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Nothing in this world is real

..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?

We live in a real world. Come back to it.

It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

Nothing is as good as it seems and nothing is as bad, but somewhere between reality falls.

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.

I care what is actually true, even more than what I hope is true.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.