Life & Wisdom Quote by Terry Pratchett

Pratchett opens with a prank on authority: he borrows the biblical throat-clearing of Genesis and immediately detonates it. “In the beginning” cues solemn origin-story rhetoric, the kind that demands reverence and obedience. Then he hands you “nothing,” a word that pretends to be metaphysical but is really a setup, and finally lands the punchline: “which exploded.” The joke works because it collapses two competing modern creation myths - scripture and cosmology - into a single deadpan sentence, treating both with the same cheery disrespect.

The subtext is Pratchett’s signature suspicion of stories that present themselves as capital-T Truth. He doesn’t argue with religion or science; he makes certainty look silly by changing the register. Cosmology’s Big Bang becomes slapstick, less a sacred event than a comic timing gag: if there was nothing, what exactly did the exploding? That small logical snag is the lever. It invites the reader to notice how much of what we call explanation is metaphor wearing a lab coat or a halo.

Context matters: Discworld’s world-building is a long riff on how societies manufacture meaning - through myths, bureaucracies, and “common sense.” Starting a universe with an absurdity signals the series’ operating system. Expect grand systems, expect them to wobble, and expect humans (and trolls, and wizards) to keep living inside those wobbling systems anyway. Pratchett isn’t dismissing wonder; he’s reclaiming it from pomposity, reminding you that awe and laughter can share the same origin point.