Douglas Adams Quotes

“Drink up. The world’s about to end.”

“Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

“Don’t Panic.”

“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?”

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst 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 reasons.”

“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all 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 there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

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

“One of the things Ford had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in ‘It’s a nice day’, ‘You’re very tall’, or ‘You seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?’ At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation, he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical, and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.”

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ ‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ ‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. ‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God. Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

“One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn’t be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.”

All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays.

All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

God’s Final Message to His Creation: We apologize for the inconvenience.

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.

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

He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.

He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them.

But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child.

If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not.

He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.

Any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and satisfied, drove on into the night.

Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing...’ twenty minutes after admitting he’d lost the argument.

It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don’t. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?

Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.

No. No games. He wanted her and didn’t care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, longed for her.

He actually caught himself saying things like “Yippee,” as he pranced ridiculously round the house.

He sniggered. He didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.

The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes.

Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink.

Rob McKenna was a miserable fatherless child and he knew it because he’d had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everybody.

“Life is wasted on the living.”

“My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.”

“I’m so great even I get tongue-tied talking to myself.”

“The little waiter’s eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion.”

“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

“Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off.”

“His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”

“He didn’t know why he had become President of the Galaxy, except that it seemed a fun thing to be.”

“It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result--collapse, ruin and famine.”

“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?‘”

“POPULATION: None. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

″‘In an infinite Universe anything can happen,’ said Ford. ‘Even survival. Strange but true.‘”

″‘If I ever meet myself,’ said Zaphod, ‘I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me.’”

″‘But what about the End of the Universe? We’ll miss the big moment.’ ‘I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish,’ said Zaphod,‘nothing but a gnab gib.’ ‘A what?’ ‘Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let’s get zappy.‘”

″‘If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you’re in trouble, need a hand out of a tight corner...’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Please don’t hesitate to get lost.’”

″‘Marvin,” he said, “just get this elevator go up will you? We’ve got to get to Zarniwoop.’ ‘Why?’ asked Marvin dolefully. ‘I don’t know,’ said Zaphod, ‘but when I find him, he’d better have a very good reason for me wanting to see him.‘”

″‘Trouble with a long journey like this,’ continued the Captain, ‘is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you’re going to say next.‘”

“I’ve never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears.”

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.”

“It was his subconscious which told him this---that infuriating part of a person’s brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.”

“Yes, it is true that sometimes unusually intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well. I think that’s something you might have to consider.”

“There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.”

“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”

“I don’t go to mythical places with strange men.”

“Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.”

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

“People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.”

“Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.”

“A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.”