Terry Pratchett Quotes

If you put me in a real Tardis, I dread to think what would happen to the universe.

More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences.

Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.

In war trivial causes produce momentous events.

It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the beginning has, as it were, nothing whatever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

In war, important events result from trivial causes.

We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.

Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more--let me see--more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... as prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters.

And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.

Every great decision creates ripples. Like a huge boulder dropping in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.

Everything you do has some effect, some impact.

I mean, anyone can let Danger out but the really clever thing is finding somewhere for it to go afterwards.

Time continued to pass - the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really is magic.

Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.

Everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation.

No effect of work can be eternal.

Camera and eye are together a time machine with which the mind and human being can do the same kind of violence to time and space as dreams.

Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

I can make the earth stop in its tracks. I made the blue cars go away. I can make myself invisible or small. I can become gigantic & reach the farthest things. I can change the course of nature. I can place myself anywhere in space or time. I can summon the dead. I can perceive events on other worlds, in my deepest inner mind, & in the minds of others. I can I am

Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.

There is, therefore, no difficulty in answering such questions as these. What cause was there why the Universe was placed in such a part of Space? and, Why was the Universe created at such a Time? for, if there be no Space beyond the Universe, it was impossible that it should be created in another place; and if there was no Time before, it was impossible it should be created at another time.

We barely have time to react in this world, let alone rehearse.

We have traveled through space and time. We have been many places. Visited many worlds. And there is good news: the acoustics everywhere are terrific.

The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.