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Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
Sep 19, 2025
You can't inspire people with facts. They need a cause. They need a symbol.
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out.
We've got a lot of experience of not having any experience
Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point MY POINT EXACTLY.
'Don't think of it as dying,' said Death. 'Just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush.'
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls.
The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.
The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to pray to.
"It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever" he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?"
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military maneuvers, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.
You know how to pray, don’t you? Just put your hands together and hope.
The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain -- the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn.
I like the idea of democracy. You have to have someone everyone distrusts.
You can't find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing.
Corporal Nobbs had been disqualified from the human race for shoving
Just because someone's a member of an ethnic minority doesn't mean they're not a nasty small-minded little jerk [...]
Words are the litmus paper of the minds. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word "commence" in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say "Enter", don't stop to pack.
Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.
If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.
And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.
Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.
I imagine that fish have no word for water.
I commend my soul to any god that can find it.
"There's a door," he whispered. "Where does it go?" "It stays where it is, I think," said Rincewind.
People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.
The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes.
Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?
Although the scythe isn't pre-eminent among the weapons of war, anyone who has been on the wrong end of, say, a peasants' revolt will know that in skilled hands it is fearsome.
The pen is mightier than the sword ... if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
"And what would humans be without love?" Rare, said Death.
People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.
Any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realize that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake.
No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.
And then you bit onto them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn't know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.
And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.
And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One: "Psst!
I feel like I am involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell me the rules, and who smiles all the time.
Cutangle: While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe. Treatle: I hadn't looked at it like that, but you're absolutely right. He's really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.
At least I know I'm bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.
Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned.
The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.
If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.