Douglas Adams Quotes

Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

Ford... you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Life is wasted on the living.

What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water!

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.

We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.

The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change.

It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase "As pretty as an airport" appear

'Totally mad,' he said, 'utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense.'

Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.

The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

Some say that the universe is made so that when we are about to understand it it changes into something even more incomprehensible. And then there are those who say that this has already happened.

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons.

Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of.

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.