Quotes About Knowledge

People were stupid, sometimes. They thought 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.

I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel.

Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.

But I think you have a right to know what it is you're not being told.

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.

Tiffany was on the whole quite a truthful person, but it seemed to her that there were times when things didn't divide easily into 'true' and 'false', but instead could be 'things that people needed to know at the moment' and 'things that they didn't need to know at the moment'.

And I went on reading; and, since if you read enough books you overflow, I eventually became a writer.

Every organization needs at least one person who knows what's going on, and why it's happening, and who's doing it.

Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.

What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?

It's a bad case o' the thinkin' he's caught, missus. When a man starts messin' wi' the readin' and the writin' then he'll come doon with a dose o' the thinkin' soon enough. I'll fetch some o' the lads and we'll hold his heid under water until he stops doin' it, 'tis the only cure. It can kill a man, the thinkin'.

If there's one thing that really annoys a god, it's not knowing something.

I dinna trust him, said Slightly Mad Angus. He reads books an' such.

Education had been easy. Learning things had been harder.

No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen...

The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.

The dwarfs can turn lead into gold... It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs. -Can we? -Damned if I know. I can't. -Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, if I could. -Can you? -No! -Ah-ha!

Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber.

It's a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they'll always seek that wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

Teppic hadn't been educated. Education had just settled on him, like dandruff.

Then the Dean repeated the mantra that has had such a marked effect on the progress of knowledge throughout the ages. "Why don't we just mix up absolutely everything and see what happens?" he said. And Ridcully responded with the traditional response. "It's got to be worth a try," he said.

She couldn't be the prince, and she'd never be a princess, and she didn't want to be a woodcutter, so she'd be the witch and know things.

She'd read the dictionary all the way through. No one told her you weren't supposed to.

I heard this story once, she said, where this bloke got locked up for years and years and he learned amazin' stuff about the universe and everythin' from another prisoner who was incredibly clever, and then he escaped and got his revenge. What incredibly clever stuff do you know about the universe, Gytha Ogg? said Granny. Bugger all, said Nanny cheerfully. Then we'd better bloody well escape right now.