Douglas adams quotes

And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. 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.

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.

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

Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature. That's how it should be. Anything invented between your th and th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.

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.

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

If we see you smoking we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action.

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

If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

It {Darwin's theory of evolution] was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

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?

Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass.

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

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

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.

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.

Democracy is all about not electing the wrong man-eating lizard.

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.

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

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.

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.

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.

The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second.

SHOEBURYNESS (abs.n.) The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from somebody else's bottom.

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

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

The kakapo is an extremely fat bird. A good-sized adult will weigh about six or seven pounds, and its wings are just about good for waggling a bit if it thinks it's about to trip over something - but flying is out of the question. Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Apparently a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.

It's not the fall that kills you; it's the sudden stop at the end.

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.

The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things

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

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, " This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in; fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well! It must have been made to have me in it!

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

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

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.

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.

Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.' 'Why not?' 'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet.

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer

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

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

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome.

The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't even know you are making.

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.

Being offended by things is the world's big hobby at the moment. It's almost taken over from wearing goatee beards.

How do you know you're having fun if there's no one watching you have it?

In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.

There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it right.

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.

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

Could be. I’m a pretty dangerous dude when I’m cornered.” “Yeah,” said the voice from under the table, “you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.

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.

Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction because it won't be coming from there.

I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.

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.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

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

Reality is hopelessly inaccurate.

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.

A cup of tea would restore my normality.

The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it.

A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.

WOKING (vb.) To enter the kitchen with the precise determination to perform something only to forget what it is just before you do it.

I don't go to mythical places with strange men.

A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.

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

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

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?

To boldly split infinitives that no man had split before.

So, the world is fine. We don’t have to save the world—the world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about, is whether or not the world we live in, will be capable of sustaining us in it. That’s what we need to think about.

The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making.

You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young." "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Do you find coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?

If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.

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.

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

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.

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.

You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool.

God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.

I'd far rather be happy than right any day.

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion on them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

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.

I don't say that I don't believe in God because that implies that there is a God for me not to believe in.

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.

I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.

Sir,' I said to the universe, 'I exist.' 'That,' said the universe, 'creates no sense of obligation in me whatsoever.

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

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 own eyes and ears.

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.

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder... Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

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

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

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

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

Alone of all the races on earth, they seem to be free from the 'Grass is Greener on the other side of the fence' syndrome, and roundly proclaim that Australia is, in fact, the other side of that fence.

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

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.

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

"I refuse to prove that I exist" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't. Q.E.D." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.

It's good to leave your room super-messy when you're away. Whoever tries to break into your room will thought it has already been ransacked.

You can't dodge your responsibilities by saying they don't exist!

Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots

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.

So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly?' I asked. He looked at me as if I were stupid. 'You die, of course. That's what deadly means.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

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 (one of the founders of Microsoft) has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second rate technology, led them into it in the first place...

The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.

We all like to congregate at boundary conditions. Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where bodies meet mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.

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

The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.

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.