Terry Pratchett Quotes

We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself.

Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

Reason cannot break out of its own loop.

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument... The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

Being is born of not being.

Said the monk: "All these mountains and rivers and the earth and stars - where do they come from?" Said the master: "Where does your question come from?"

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.

If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by the very condition of the cases, was supernatural; the laws of Nature cannot account for their own origin.

Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.

Again, if the world is destroyed, it must needs either be destroyed according to nature or against nature. Against nature is impossible, for that which is against nature is not stronger than nature. If according to nature, there must be another nature which changes the nature of the world: which does not appear.

All that my work has shown is that you don't have to say that the way the universe began was the personal whim of God.

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment.

Everything is illusion. Even that last sentence.

To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.

So when people ask me if I believe God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It's like asking for directions to the edge of the earth; the earth is a sphere, it doesn't have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

Whence? wither? why? how? - these questions cover all philosophy.

i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.

Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific.

if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.

I have a much easier time imagining how we would understand the big bang, even though we can't do it yet, than I can imagine understanding consciousness.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.