Most horses don't walk backwards voluntarily, because what they can't see doesn't exist.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that many beings, like horses, prefer moving forward and often disregard the past or the unknown.
Terry Pratchett's quote illustrates the tendency of both animals and humans to focus on the present and future rather than on what's behind them. It reflects a philosophical outlook on perception and existence, emphasizing that our understanding of reality is often limited to what we can see and understand. Much like horses that instinctively avoid walking backward, individuals may choose to ignore past experiences or uncertain aspects of life, suggesting that the unseen or unknown holds little power over our current actions.
In practice
In a motivational speech about moving forward in life, one might say, 'As Terry Pratchett noted, most horses don't walk backwards voluntarily, reminding us to focus on our future.'
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.
Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.
People with the strongest and healthiest sense of calling are not obsessed with their calling. They are preoccupied with the Caller.
All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.
I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life injecting my story into the veins of leaves only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons
We say, and we say openly, and while ye torture us, mangled and gory we cry out, "We worship God through Christ!" Believe Him a man: it is through Him and in Him that God willeth Himself to be known and worshipped.
It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.
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