Pyramids

Battle elephants! Teppic groaned. Tsort went in for battle elephants, too. Battle elephants were the fashion lately. They weren't much good for anything except trampling on their own when they inevitably panicked, so the military minds on both sides had responded by breeding bigger elephants. Elephants were impressive. (p. 256)

They are great minds, he told himself. These are men who are trying to work out how the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion, but just by inserting their brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart. (p. 225)

He'd wanted changes. It was just that he wanted things to stay the same, as well. (p. 315)

Teppic stared into his wine mug. These men are philosophers, he thought. They had told him so. So their brains must be so big that they have room for ideas that no one else would consider for five seconds. On the way to the tavern Xeno had explained to him, for example, why it was logically impossible to fall out of a tree. (p. 213)

However, it is well known that most people don't listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they're going to say next.

Belief is a force. It's a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time. (p. 202)

Just because fate throws you together doesn't mean fate's got it right. (p. 312)

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

The Sphinx is an unreal creature. It exists solely because it has been imagined. (p. 264)

The noise stopped, filling the air with the dark metallic clang of sudden silence. (p. 301)

Those first pyramids had been built by human beings, little bags of thinking water held up briefly by fragile accumulations of calcium, who had cut rocks into pieces and then painfully put them back together again in a better shape. (p. 96)

Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language. No, we do it for the money. And because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money. There can be few cleaner motives, shorn of all pretense.(p. 46)

His mother, as far as he could remember, had been a pleasant woman and as self-centred as a gyroscope. (p. 29)

Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid. (p. 135)

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free. (p. 35)

It's a fact as immutable as the Third Law of Sod that there is no such thing as a good Grand Vizier. A predilection to cackle and plot is apparently part of the job spec.

Funny, that. When he was alive it had all seemed so sensible, so obvious. Now he was dead it looked a huge waste of effort. (p. 71)

It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It's because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations. (p. 171)

There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite, for example, would count as gentrification. (p. 6)

Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do. (p. 77)

A few stars had been let out early. Teppic looked up at them. Perhaps, he thought, there is life somewhere else. On the stars, maybe. If it's true that there are billions of universes stacked alongside one another, the thickness of a thought apart, then there must be people elsewhere.

When you die, the first thing you lose is your life. The next thing is your illusions. (p. 58)

The culture of the river kingdom had a lot to say about death and what happened afterward. In fact it had very little to say about life, regarding it as a sort of inconvenient prelude to the main event and something to be hurried through as politely as possible. (p. 56)

You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated. (p. 100)