His fellow wizards weren’t stupid, but you had to be careful to shape ideas to fit the holes in their heads. (DW)
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Senior wizards of Unseen University are masters of dynamic inactivity. But when danger threatens they can be relied upon to pull together, although not necessarily, it must be said, in the same direction.
It has been pointed out that while they have understood that the first step on the path to wisdom is to become as a small child, they haven’t grasped that there is a second step. (PP) It wasn’t that Ridcully was stupid. Truly stupid wizards have the life expectancy of a glass hammer. He had quite a powerful intellect, but it was powerful like a locomotive, and ran on rails and was therefore almost impossible to steer. (LL)
'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) 'Laughing in the face of danger is not a survival strategy,’ said the god.
‘Oh, they don’t laugh,’ said Ponder gloomily. ‘They say things like, “you call that dangerous? It’s not a patch on the kind of danger you used to get when we were lads, eh, Senior Wrangler, what what?' (LC) Another response of the wizards, when faced with a new and unique situation, was to look through their libraries to see if it had ever happened before. This was, Lord Vetinari reflected, a good survival trait. It meant that in times of danger you spent the day sitting very quietly in a building with very thick walls. (LH)
The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame. (LC)
Like many people, wizards often have secrets they don’t want themselves to know. (TG)
Knowing the time of your death is one of those strange bonuses that comes with being a true magic user. And, on the whole, it is a bonus.
Many a wizard has passed away happily drinking the last of his wine cellar and incidentally owing very large sums of money. (LL) Wizards don’t like philosophy very much. As far as they are concerned, one hand clapping makes a noise like ‘cl’. (S)
Misogynists to a man, the wizards were therefore always punctiliously polite to ladies. (TG)
Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards – not ‘not doing magic’ because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could and didn’t. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you know how easy it is. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again. (GP)
Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.
The trick was to do magic and get away with it. (MP) Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.
At least, that’s what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingeingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff. (MP) Silence gradually reclaimed the Library. Silence drifted around the remains of a hat, heavily battered and frayed and charred around the edges, that had been placed with some ceremony in a niche in the wall. No matter how far a wizard goes, he will always come back for his hat.
Silence filled the University in the same way that air fills a hole. Night spread across the Disk like plum jam, or possibly blackberry preserve. But there would be a morning. There would always be another morning. (S) The University sanitarium wasn’t very big, and was seldom used. Wizards tended to be either in rude health, or dead. The only medicine they generally required was an antacid formula and a dark room until lunch. (MP)
If there’s one thing a wizard hates, it’s having to wait while the person in front of them is in two minds about coleslaw. It’s a salad bar, they say, it’s got the kind of stuff salad bars have, if it was surprising it wouldn’t be a salad bar, you’re not here to lookat it. What do you expect to find? Rhino chunks? Pickled coelacanth? (MR)
'This is a robe,’ said Rincewind quickly. ‘And you’d better watch out, because I’m a wizard.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Lay a finger on me, and you’ll make me wish you hadn’t. I warn you.' (S)
Wizards can put up with any amount of deprivation and discomfort, provided it is not happening to them. (SODW)
... any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realise that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake. (E)
They were, after all, wizards. That meant that if they saw something, they prodded it. If it wobbled they prodded it some more. If you built a guillotine, and then put a sign on it saying ‘Do Not Put Your Neck On This Block’, many wizards would never have to buy a hat again. (SODW)
Any true wizard, faced with a sign like ‘Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We’re not kidding. Opening
the door will mean the end of the universe,’ would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss was about. (LC) The wizards were entering the special fugue state known as the Hubbub, where no-one was going to be allowed to finish a sentence because someone else would drown them out. It was how the wizards decided things. (TG)
Wizards seldom bothered to look things up if they could reach an answer by bickering at cross-purposes. (SODW)
Talking to the senior wizards was like building a house of cards; if you got anything to stay upright, you just breathed out gently and moved on. (SODW)
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The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
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