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50 Delightfully Bizarre Douglas Adams Quotes That Will Make You Question The Human Condition

Because life has always been a little bit odd by nature. 
Heidi Priebe
June 14, 2016
“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
“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.”
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Tagged: Life, The Universe, humor, Creation, Building the 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.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Life, Happiness, Human Nature, Mankind
“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.”
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Tagged: Life, The Universe, Reality
“"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
“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
“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
“If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Ego, Mankind, The Human Condition
“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Life, Experience, Living
“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
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Tagged: Technology, Generations, New Technology
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Tagged: Life, Perception, Perspective
“Don't Panic.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Panic, Motto
“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
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Time, Perception, Life, Reality
“Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Reality, Accuracy, Perception
“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.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Happiness, Materialism, Money, The Human Condition
“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
“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
“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
“We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.”
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Tagged: Obsession, Obsessiveness
“All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: The Universe, Life
“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
“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
“"All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that."”
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tagged: Paranoia, Fear, Mankind, The Human Condition
“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
“Life is wasted on the living.”
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Tagged: Life, Living, Being Alive, Embracing Life
“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
“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
“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