Quotes About Knowledge

There's no educating a smart boy.

Funny, reely, he said. You spend your whole life goin' to school and learnin' stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there's all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin', that's what I want to know.

This is no way to treat a book," he said. "Look, he's bent the spine right back. People always do that, they've got no idea of how to treat them.

All witches who'd lived in her cottage were bookish types. They thought you could see life through books but you couldn't, the reason being that the words got in the way.

You can either be on the stage, just a performer, just going through the lines... or you can be outside it, and know how the script works, where the scenery hangs, and where the trapdoors are.

Think critically about what you are told. Do not accept the word of authority unthinkingly. Science is not a belief system: no belief system instructs you to question the system itself. Science does. (There are many scientists, however, who treat it as a belief system. Be wary of them.)

The past needs to be remembered. If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going.

There's some things we can't think because we don't know the words.

They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.

That just goes to show that you never know, although what it is we never know I suspect we'll never know.

What some people need, said Magrat, to the world in general, is a bit more heart. What some people need, said Granny Weatherwax, to the stormy sky, is a lot more brain. Then she clutched at her hat to stop the wind from blowing it off. What I need, thought Nanny Ogg fervently, is a drink.

He stared at his feet. "I'm still very ignorant," he said, "but at least I'm ignorant about really important things.

We ain't going to curse anyone," said Granny firmly. "It hardly ever works if they don't know you've done it.

Science is not interested in what stands to reason.

Well, basically, there are two sorts of opera, said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever.

logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.

It is considered in the Sto Plains that only scoundrels know the second verse of their national anthem, since anyone spending time memorizing that would be up to no good purpose.

Hah! said Granny Weatherwax. I should just say it is a folk song! I knows all about folk songs. Hah! You think you're listenin' to a nice song about...cuckoos and fiddlers and nightingales and whatnot, and then it turns out to be about...something else entirely, she added darkly.

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.

That was how it worked. No magic at all. But that time it had been magic. And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.