Quotes About Reality

either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business...

A unicorn is nothing more than a big horse that comes to a point, anyway. Nothing to get so excited about.

She'd struck Esk once before – the blow a baby gets to introduce it to the world and give it a rough idea of what to expect from life.

Fair?" said the Sea Queen. She moved forward. Om felt her all around him. "There's no such thing," she said. "Life's like a beach. And then you die.

If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"…was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called him handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"…well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories didn't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told

Thus proving that dreams that come true are not always the right dreams. Does wearing a glass slipper lead to a comfortable life? If everything you touch turns into marshmallows, won't that make things a bit . . . sticky?

The gods, he said. Imprisoned in a thought. And perhaps they were never more than a dream.

But if it is true that the act of observing changes the thing which is observed (because of Quantum), it's even more true that it changes the observer.

71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn't believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren't true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed.

They are tragic,' said Vetinari, 'and we laugh at their tragedy as we laugh at our own. The painted grin leers out at us from the darkness, mocking our insane belief in order, logic, status, the reality of reality. The mask knows that we are born on the banana skin that leads only to the open manhole cover of doom, and all we can hope for are the cheers of the crowd.

For wolves and pigs and bears, thinking that they're human is a tragedy. For a cat, it's an experience.

DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR TRUST IN ROOT VEGETABLES. WHAT THINGS SEEM TO BE MAY NOT BE WHAT THEY ARE. -Death

Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes forgot that it also changed the observer too.

Sometimes people fools themselves into believing things that aren't true. Sometimes that can be quite dangerous for the person. They see the world in a wrong way. They won't let themselves see that what they believe is wrong. But often there is a part of the mind that does know, and the right words can let it out.

But all them things exist, said Nanny Ogg. That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages 'em.

The universe required everything to be observed, lest it cease to exist.

Fairyland, where dreams can hurt. Somewhere all stories are real, all songs are true. I thought that was a strange thing for the kelda to say. . . .

HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. Or, from the very next page, YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?

Reality so often fails when it comes to small, satisfying details, she thought.

only those with their feet on rock can build castles in the air.

Listen, happy endings is fine if they turn out happy," said Granny, glaring at the sky. "But you can't make 'em for other people. Like the only way you could make a happy marriage is by cuttin' their heads off as soon as they say 'I do', yes? You can't make happiness…

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

It is very easy to get ridiculously confused about the tenses of time travel, but most things can be resolved by a sufficiently large ego.