It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works.
Interpretation
Understanding something does not diminish its wonder or beauty.
This quote by Terry Pratchett suggests that the magical elements of life do not lose their significance simply because we gain knowledge about their workings. It emphasizes that the awe and charm in life, art, or nature can coexist with a rational understanding, encouraging us to appreciate both the magic and the science behind our experiences.
In practice
In a speech about the wonders of science educating students about the beauty of nature.
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.
The intolerance of the few, or the risk of it, carries the day against the wider humanity of the many.
You've confused a war on your religion with not always getting everything you want.
Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
Today, as always, the people, no less than the courts, must remain vigilant to preserve the principals of our Bill of Rights, lest in our desire to be secure we lose our ability to be free.
Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.
The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.
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