Gods didn’t mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery, atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief. (SG)
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... the gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight. (E)
'... it’s even easier to be a crook when no one knows you’re a crook, haha. But coppering depends on people believing you’re a copper.' (NW)
Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see. (NW)
Colon in particular had great difficulty with the idea that you went on investigating after someone had confessed. It outraged his training and experience. You got a confession and there it ended. You didn’t go around disbelieving people. You disbelieved people only when they said they were innocent. Only guilty people were trustworthy. (FC)
'I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult," said Granny firmly. ‘Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.’
‘But all them things exist,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.' (LL) Perdita remembered Magrat bringing a guitar to a Hogswatchnight party once and singing wobbly folk songs with her eyes shut in a way that suggested that she really believed in them. She hadn’t been able to play, but this was all right because she couldn’t sing, either. (LL)
... he didn’t believe in supernatural monsters. He shivered. He hoped they didn’t believe in him. (CP)
‘Belief in the survival of what is laughably called the soul after death is a primitive superstition which has no place in a dynamic socialist society!’
They looked at him. ‘You don’t tzink,’ said Solomon Einstein, carefully, ‘that it is worth reconsidering your opinions in the light of experimental evidence?’ ‘Don’t think you can get around me just because you’re accidentally right! Just because I happen to find myself still…basically here,’ said William Stickers, ‘does not invalidate the general theory!’ (JD) He wanted, intensely, to believe in a world where logic worked. It was a matter of faith. (TG)
Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. (LC)
He’d never been keen on heroes. But he realized that he needed them to be there, like forests and mountains ... he might never see them, but they filled some sort of hole in his mind. Some sort of hole in everyone’s mind. (LH)
Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. (GO)
'Look,’ said Susan, ‘I’d just like you to know that I don’t believe any of this. I don’t believe there’s a Death of Rats in a cowl carrying a scythe.’
‘He’s standing in front of you.’ ‘That’s no reason to believe it.’ ‘I can see you’ve certainly had a proper education'. (SM) ... he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist. (GO)
For some reason, humans needed things that weren't true. (Wings)
'She's a servant of the Store,' said Gurder, who was still trembling. 'She's the enemy of the dreadful Prices Slashed, who wanders the corridors at night with his terrible shining light, to catch evil nomes!'
'It's a good job you don't believe in him, then,' said Masklin. 'Of course I don't,' agreed Gurder. 'Your teeth are chattering, though.' 'That's because my teeth believe in him. And so do my knees. and my stomach. It's only mt head that doesn't and it's being carried around by a load of superstitious cowards.' (Truck) Wizards don’t believe in gods. They didn’t deny their existence, of course. They just didn’t believe. It was nothing personal; they weren’t actually rude about it. Gods were a visible part of narrativium that made things work, that gave the world its purpose. It was just that they were best avoided close up. (DW)
'We say Seeing is Believing…and I thought about that, and it’s not really true. We don’t believe in chairs. Chairs are just things that exist.’
‘So?’ said Ridcully. ‘We don’t believe in things we can see. We believe in things that we can’t see.' (TG) The cemetery of Small Gods was for people who didn’t know what happened next. They didn’t know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn’t know what hit them. They’d gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city’s bone orchards the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked Misc, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very
much. (NW) ‘Many people find faith a great solace,’ he said. He wished he was one of them.
‘Good.’ ‘Really? Somehow I thought you’d argue.’ ‘It’s not my place to tell ‘em what to believe, if they act decent.’ ‘But it’s not something that you feel drawn to, perhaps, in the darker hours?’ ‘No. I’ve already got a hot water bottle.' (CJ) ‘But you read a lot of books, I’m thinking. Hard to have faith, ain’t it, when you’ve read too many books?' (CJ)
‘Just as Om reached out his hand to save the prophet Brutha from the torture, so will he spread his wings over me in my time of trial,’ said Oats, but he sounded as though he was trying to reassure himself rather than Nanny. He went on: ‘I’ve got a pamphlet if you would like to know more,’ and this time the tone was much more positive, as if the existence of Om was a little uncertain whereas the existence of pamphlets was obvious to any open-minded rational-thinking person. (CJ)
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. (J)
YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? (H)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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