“Studying martial arts is no Sunday picnic.”
Master Roshi Quotes
5 quotes from Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Super, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
Master Roshi controls entry to martial training and uses that authority for his own gratification. In the licensed opening of Dragon Ball Volume 3, Kame-Sen’nin makes Goku’s instruction conditional on bringing him an attractive woman. Goku’s literal misunderstandings expose the distance between what the pupil hopes to learn and what the teacher wants. Roshi even describes enduring blows as preparation for fighting, after a woman strikes him for his unwanted approach. The martial explanation gives his behavior a convenient justification; it does not make the encounter a planned lesson. These observations use Tale 25, printed pages 7–17. They concern the condition before the training program begins, rather than evidence that later instruction excuses his treatment of women.
“But, you will not go in there with hopes of winning the tournament the first time you compete. To do so would be arrogant!”
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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!”
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The joke is that he is enormously vain, and the series knows. 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.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Ah, yes. Mercenary Tao. He was a killer. Some say a natural. However, your skills in that department are mediocre at best. You'll never measure up to him because you have a conscience.”
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Roshi has just offered Tien a place as one of the new generation's heroes, and Tien has answered with a speech ending "I'm a killer, like Tao!" A sermon would lose him, so Roshi does not argue that killing is wrong. He grades it as a skill and marks Tien down. The insult is built to be unbearable to exactly this young man, whose entire pride is technique, and the compliment is smuggled inside it as the reason for the failing grade. Then he leaves with "Go get 'em... killer," which turns Tien's chosen identity into a nickname. The mechanism depends on the tournament having already shown Tien's cruelty to be real but borrowed, most of it inherited from Shen's grudge over Tao. It works within the same tournament: in the final he breaks with his master in front of the crowd. The old man's method is the franchise's best piece of teaching because it never once states the lesson.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Goku has people who help raise each other up. Not only do we all treasure each other greatly, but our existence also gives Goku strength. I'm sure he doesn't believe, even for a moment, that he came this far by himself.”
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Goku's record as a friend is the case against this. He chose to stay dead for seven years after the Cell Games, left for a training journey in Super shortly after his granddaughter was born, and has entered this very tournament partly because he wanted a fight. A man that often absent is a strange advertisement for a web of mutual support, and his old teacher is not a neutral witness. Roshi's claim survives the objection because it is narrower than it sounds. He does not say Goku is a good friend. He says their existence gives Goku strength, which the franchise made literal years earlier when a whole planet raised its hands for the Spirit Bomb. The argument is aimed at Jiren, who answers it minutes later with a blast into the stands meant to prove that attachments can be wiped out in an instant. Roshi is not praising Goku. He is describing a power source Jiren has refused on principle, and he is correct that Goku never refused it.
About Master Roshi
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Read Master Roshi's story from the start
Explore Dragon Ball in book form. Check the listing for the edition, language and volumes included. The source beside each quote records where its wording was checked; it may differ from the wording in this edition.
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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 center 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.