'… you know how it is with boundaries,' Ridcully mumbled. 'You look at what's on the other side and you realize why there was a boundary in the first place.' (UA)
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There is a phrase 'neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring.' This thing was all of them, plus some other bits of beast unknown to science or nightmare or even kebab. (UA)
'Carefully directed ignorance is the key to all knowledge.' (CCODD)
'What is a university for if it isn't to tell you that everything you think you know is wrong?' (CCODD)
'Why do you ask so many questions, Mau?'
'Because I want so many answers!' (N) The little flickering part of his brain that was still sparking coherent thought through the fog of mind-numbing terror that filled Colon’s head was telling him that he was so far out of his depth that the fish had lights on their noses. (FE)
Mustrum Ridcully was notorious for not trying to understand things if there was anyone around to do it for him. (LC)
'Oh no,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. ‘Not that. That’s meddling with things we don’t understand.’
‘Well we are wizards,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’re supposed to meddle with things we don’t understand. If we hung around waitin’ till we understood things we’d never get anything done.' (IT) Man was never intended to understand things he meddled with. (P)
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’. (WFM)
If you think everything’s going right, something’s going wrong that you haven’t heard about yet. (Dig)
... it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you’re attempting can’t be done. (ER)
'If you can’t learn to ride an elephant, you can at least learn to ride a horse.’
‘What’s an elephant?’ ‘A kind of badger,’ said Granny. She hadn’t maintained forest-credibility for forty years by ever admitting ignorance. (ER) Like many people, wizards often have secrets they don’t want themselves to know. (TG)
'Nothing ever finishes. Nothing’s ever really over.’
It was Johnny who said that. He was surprised at himself. ‘Correct! Are you a physicist?’ ‘Me?’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t know the anything about science!’ ‘Marvellous! Ideal qualification!’ said Einstein. ‘What?’ 'Ignorance is very important! It is an absolutely essential step in the learning process!' (JD) ... 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)
'Knowing things is magical, if other people don’t know them.' (HFS)
'…the way I see it, logic is only a way of being ignorant by numbers.' (SG)
Leaders weren’t allowed not to know. (AM)
... it wasn’t wise to try to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural talent. If you got it wrong you could go from ignorant to cackling in a week ... (W)
'You don't have to make it work, anyway. You have to stop it working. You don't need knowledge for that, you need ignorance. (GO)
'I'm an Igor, thur. We don’t athk quethtionths.’
‘Really? Why not?’ ‘I don’t know, thur. I didn’t athk.' (MM) '... there’s a lot goes on that we don’t know about.’
‘Like what, exactly?’ retorted Colon. ‘Name me one thing that’s going on that you don’t know about. There – you can’t, can you?' (NW) That was always the dream, wasn’t it? ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now’? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn’t the 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. (NW) |
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