'That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way ...' (MM)
0 Comments
'To see the light is to be blinded. Do you not know that in darkness the eyes open wider?' (Th)
'How can you send a picture on the clacks?’ said Polly. ‘I know people who’ve seen them. It’s just a lot of boxes on a tower that go clack-clack!’
‘Ah, Otto explained that to me, too,’said Maladict. ‘It’s very ingenious.’ ‘How does it work, then?’ ‘Oh, I didn’t understand what he said. It was all about…numbers. But it certainly sounded very clever.' (MR) 'Ah, I’ve got an idea!’ said the Dean, beaming. ‘We can get Hex to reverse the thaumic flow in the cthonic matrix of the optimized bi-direction octagonate, can’t we?’
‘Well, that’s the opinion of four glasses of sherry,’ said the Archchancellor briskly, to break the ensuing silence. 'However, if I may express a preference, something that isn’t complete gibberish would be more welcome next time, please.' (SODW) 'He always thinks everything has to mean something,’ said Ridcully, who generally took the view that trying to find any deep meaning to events was like trying to find reflections in a mirror: you always succeeded, but you didn’t learn anything new. (SODW)
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)
Lu-Tze sighed. ‘Y’know, most of what you get taught is lies. It has to be. Sometimes if you get the truth all at once,you can’t understand it.' (TOT)
'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.' (TOT)
'The secret is not to dream,’ she whispered, ‘The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and
I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I’m going.' (WFM) SCIENCE: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it’s wrong. There is a lot more to Science than you think. (Wings)
'I don’t begin to understand,’ he said, flatly. ‘To me it sounds like Jargon.’
‘JARGON?’ Hrsh-Hgn turned to the Bank. ‘Nonsense,’ he explained. ‘In Sadhimist tradition God invented it to foresstall the firsst attempt at intersstellar travel. To prevent scientissts from understanding each other, you understand.' (DSS) 'Just because you can explain it doesn’t mean it’s not still a miracle.' (SG)
'It’s very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.' (NW)
'They think I can see into their hearts, but no witch can do that. Not without surgery, at least.' (W)
And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done. (WFM)
+++Despite being wrong in every important respect, that is a very good analogy+++ (DW)
Lu-Tze had long considered that everything happens for a reason, except possibly football. (TOT)
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)
Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn’t been one of them. (M) He believed, against all experience, that the world was fundamentally understandable, and that if he could only equip himself with the right mental toolbox he could take the back off and see how it worked. He was, of course, dead wrong. (LF)
... it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place. (RM)
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) 'I was just hoping that if I didn’t say anything you’d stop trying to explain things to me.' (LH)
|
Author
The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
All
Archives
March 2023
|