“Studying martial arts is no Sunday picnic.”
Master Roshi Quotes
3 quotes from Dragon Ball, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
A lecherous old man in sunglasses who trains children by making them deliver milk. The register the original series actually operated in, and the one everybody has forgotten.
“But, you will not go in there with hopes of winning the tournament the first time you compete. To do so would be arrogant!”
An instruction not to expect to win, issued by a teacher to students about to enter a tournament, and it is the opposite of what every subsequent series in this franchise teaches. Compare it against what the sequel does with the same institution: tournaments become the mechanism by which characters ascend, and expecting to win is the correct attitude because the plot rewards it. Here the tournament is a measuring device. You enter to find out where you are, you lose, you train, you come back. That is a workable model of improvement and it is the one the franchise abandoned, which is why the early arcs still feel like a sport and the later ones feel like an escalation.
“And arrogance is for fools, not warriors!”
The joke is that he is enormously vain, and the series knows. He is a self-declared turtle hermit with a reputation he tends carefully, sunglasses he never removes, and a habit of announcing his own legend. So the line functions on two levels at once: sound instruction, and a man who cannot follow it. What makes it worth keeping rather than laughing off is that the distinction he draws is real and specific — arrogance is not the same as confidence, and the difference is whether it survives contact with a better opponent. He is vain about his past and clear-eyed about his present, which is why he stops competing at exactly the right moment. Most characters in this franchise never learn that.
Delivered by a lecherous old man in sunglasses who trains children by making them deliver milk, which is the register the original series actually operates in and which almost nobody remembers. Dragon Ball was a gag comedy. The training is a joke, the master is a pervert, the tournaments are slapstick, and the boy at the centre is feral rather than heroic. Everything people mean when they say Dragon Ball (the screaming, the transformations, the hour-long charge-ups) belongs to the sequel. Worth stating plainly on a quote site, because the lines that survive from this era read oddly next to Z's, and the reason is not that they are worse. They are from a different genre.