Quotes About Learning

So I had to learn. All my life. The hard way. And the hard way's pretty hard, but not so hard as the easy way. I learned.

Mort remembered the woodcut in his grandmother's almanack, between the page on planting times and the phases of the moon section, showing Dethe thee Great Levyller Comes To Alle Menne. He'd stared at it hundreds of times when learning his letters. It wouldn't have been half so impressive if it had been generally known that the flame-breathing horse the specter rode was called Binky.

Oh, no, said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. Not that. That's meddling with things you don't understand. Well, we are wizards, said Ridcully. We're supposed to meddle in things we don't understand. If we hung around waitin' till we understood things we'd never get anything done.

An education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

Too many books in one place, who knew what they could do? Miss Tick told her one day: 'Knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is matter, matter is mass, and mass changes time and space.

For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting such store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.

You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you. You're right. I'm older. You've lived longer than me but I'm older than you. And better'n you. And, madam, that ain't hard.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: 'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?

My first novel was published by the first publisher I sent it to. And so I've been learning as I go, and I find it now rather embarrassing that people beginning the Discworld series start with The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which I don't think are some of the best books to start with. This is the author saying this, folks. Do not start at the beginning with Discworld.

On the Kite, the situation was being 'workshopped'. This is the means by which people who don't know anything get together to pool their ignorance.

And he read Principles of Accounting all morning, but just to make it interesting, he put lots of dragons in it.

How many books are there? said Masklin. Hundreds! Thousands! Do you know what they're all about? Gurder looked at him blankly. Do you know what you're saying? he said. No. But I want to find out. They're about everything! You'd never believe it! They're full of words even I don't understand! Can you find a book which tells you how to understand words you don't understand? said Masklin. Gurder hesitated. It's an intriguing thought, he said.

That was always the dream, wasn't it? "I wish I knew then what I know now"? But when you got older, you found out that you now wasn't you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp. A much better dream, one that'd ensure sounder sleep, was not to know now what you didn't know then.

Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There'd be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn't know how not to turn people into them. And big pink balloons, too.

She taught me so much, she said to herself. She built me as we were walking around after the sheep, and she told me all those things that I needed to know, and the first thing was to look after people. Of course, the other thing had been to look after the sheep.

the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.

Ignorance is a wonderful thing—it's the state you have to be in before you can really learn anything.

a hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

Thus proving that books can teach you much, if only to give you a good name for a devilish, smart goat.

And you know what? Books live. The pages remember!

there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre

That's old Twoflower, Rincewind thought. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect.

There is no higher life form than a librarian.

He was doing journalism in order to eat, which is a very good way of learning journalism. Probably the only real way, come to think of it.