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Douglas Adams Quotes

Total quotes: 43
“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Advice, Life, Living, How To Handle Advice
“Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.”
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless(Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Tagged: Perception, Universe
“See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Proof, Truth, Science
“I'd far rather be happy than right any day.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Happiness, Being Right, Being Happy, Smart vs. Happy
“No, what's this? What's this? This is nothing, yeah we're going to die.”
— Ford Prefect, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Movie Quotes, Fantasy Movies, Deep
“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.”
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Tagged: Life, Understanding, Knowledge, Ignorance, Bias
“Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Politics, Presidency
“Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Successful People
“Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Truth About Being Human
“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Genius, Intelligence, Competence, Foolishness
“God's Final Message to His Creation:
'We apologize for the inconvenience.'”
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Tagged: God, Religion, Creation
“There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.”
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Tagged: impossible, Possibility, Pessimism
“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.”
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Tagged: Learning, Mankind, Human Nature
“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Perception, Self-Perception, Reality
“If there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Universe, Maniacs
“OK, Arthur, I've got something to tell you. Its unfortunate but its true. Your whole planet has been blown up.”
— Ford Prefect, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Movie Quotes, Fantasy Movies
“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Essentials, Good Advice
“"The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."”
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Tagged: humor, Flying, Success, Failure
“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Life, Reality, Dream, Illusion
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Foolishness, Fools, Mankind, Design, Development
“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.”
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything(Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Tagged: Life, Afterlife, Religion, prayer, humor
“'How can I tell,' said the man, 'that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?’”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Reality, Perception, The Past
“How do you know you're having fun if there's no one watching you have it?”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.”
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Tagged: first lines of books
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Tagged: Destiny, Fate, Life, Intentions, Off-Track
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Tagged: Presidency, President, Politics
“Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Past, present, Future
“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.”
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Tagged: Subconscious, Mind, Brain
“'The light works,' he said, indicating the window, 'the gravity works,' he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. 'Anything else we have to take our chances with.’ ”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Tagged: Inspiring, doable, unthinkable
“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 chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: whimsical, Funny, Universe, Space
“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Life, Experience, Living
“There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.”
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Tagged: Falling Out Of Love, Moments, Not The Same
“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Uncertainty, Definitions, Rigidity, humanity, Human Nature
“Life is wasted on the living.”
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Tagged: Life, Living, Being Alive, Embracing Life
“You guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: insults, losers, Unhip
“Don't Panic.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Panic, Motto
“I have an exceptionally large mind.”
— Marvin, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Movie Quotes
“This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Life, Struggle, Thursday
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