Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.
Interpretation
Treat others as you would want to be treated, promoting kindness and empathy.
This quote emphasizes the importance of treating others with the same care and consideration you would want for yourself. It suggests that our actions and decisions should reflect empathy and understanding, and if more people adopted this mindset, the world would be a more compassionate place.
In practice
In a team meeting, I quoted Terry Pratchett to remind my colleagues to be considerate in their feedback.
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.
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
Let us not only remember the past and its required sacrifice, let us also remember that we are responsible to build a legacy for the generations which follow us.
It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth.
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
Keep the circus going inside you, keep it going, don't take anything too seriously, it'll all work out in the end.
He who has nothing—it has been said many times—has nothing to lose but his chains.
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