Ponder just let it happen. It's because their minds are so often involved with deep and problematic matters, he told himself, that their mouths are allowed to wander around making a nuisance of themselves.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that deep thinkers may allow trivial chatter as a form of distraction from complex issues.
In this quote by Terry Pratchett, the narrator reflects on the tendency of people who are often consumed by complicated thoughts to let their mouths stray into meaningless chatter. This observation implies that when individuals grapple with deep and troubling matters, they might engage in superficial conversations as a way to cope or distract themselves, highlighting a common human behavior where the mind seeks relief from heavier concerns.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of conversation, when explaining why people might talk idly, you could quote Pratchett to illustrate the point.
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 a universal respect and even admiration for those who are humble and simple by nature, and who have absolute confidence in all human beings irrespective of their social status.
PROVIDENTIAL, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
Like a tongue on frozen steel, like flesh in flame —
Would all, who cherish such wild wishes, but look around them, they would oftenest find their sphere of duty, of prosperity, and happiness, within those precincts, and in that station where Providence itself has cast their lot. Happy they who read the riddle without a weary world-search, or a lifetime spent in vain!
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