Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

I didn’t mean to hit the umpire with the dirt, but I did mean to hit that bastard in the stands.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Be the hunter, not the hunted.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

Successful people make money. It’s not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Some people love so hard that they can’t control those emotions when they’re at their deepest point.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

As you think, so shall you become.

I believe that when you think of the negative, and you get up discouraged – ‚There’s nothing good in my future‘ – I really believe it almost ties the hands of God. God works where there’s an attitude of faith. I believe faith is all about hope.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

The question is not, ‚Do you have a problem?‘ The question is, ‚Does the problem have you?‘

I never think of myself as an icon. What is in other people’s minds is not in my mind. I just do my thing.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can’t let our circumstances or what others do or don’t do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

The most important 6 inches on the battlefield is between your ears.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

We are in a wrong state of mind if we are not in a thankful state of mind.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people’s bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

I think that we have opportunities all around us – sometimes we just don’t recognize them.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

You can be happy where you are.

Ageing’s alright, better than the alternative, which is not being here.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

Think and grow rich.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.