Personal’s not the same as important. People just think it is.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that personal feelings and experiences are often mistakenly valued as being the most important when they are not necessarily so.
Terry Pratchett's quote highlights a common misunderstanding where personal experiences are perceived as significant, while the quote implies that real importance lies elsewhere. It invites reflection on the difference between subjective personal value and objective importance, encouraging individuals to question their own assumptions about significance in life.
In practice
During a discussion about priorities at work, this quote can be used to remind colleagues that personal issues shouldn't overshadow professional responsibilities.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
If you caught your kid raising cats in tiny boxes, forcing them to live in their own feces without clean air or sunlight, pulling their teeth and claws out with pliers to keep them from hurting each other…you’d rush him to a psychiatrist. But you support that very behavior every time you buy meat, eggs, dairy or fur.
In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.
It is perilously easy to have amazing sympathy with God's truth and remain in sin.
The Church must breathe with her two lungs!
Peace is the precious fruit of a righteous life. It is possible because of the Atonement of the Savior. It is earned through full repentance, for that leads to refreshing forgiveness.
One of the most persistent ambiguities that we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal. However, it does not take sharpest-eyed sophistication to discern that while everbody talks about peace, peace has become practically nobody's business among the power-wielders. Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.
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