Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races... very handy.
Interpretation
The quote humorously highlights the tortoise's wisdom in navigating life at its own pace, suggesting that steady and thoughtful actions can lead to success.
In this quote, Terry Pratchett uses the tortoise as a metaphor for wisdom and perseverance, illustrating the idea that slow and steady progress can often triumph over haste and recklessness. By referencing the classic race between the tortoise and the hare, Pratchett underscores the importance of consistency and careful decision-making in life's challenges, suggesting that being philosophical and taking oneβs time can be incredibly beneficial.
In practice
This quote could be used in a motivational speech to encourage students to pursue their studies with patience.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
But how awful would that be? How terrible to live surrounded by the stark, sharp, hollowness of things that simply were enough?
The spiritual journey is one of continuous learning and purification. When you know this, you become humble.
He whose head is in heaven need not fear to put his feet into the grave.
Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.
When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity - what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.
At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.
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