Douglas Noel Adams was born on the 11th of March, 1952 in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He was was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist. Douglas Adams is a renowned British comic writer whose works satirize contemporary life through a luckless protagonist who deals ineptly with societal forces beyond his control.
Douglas Adams was best known for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” A mock-science fiction that originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a “trilogy” of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and in 2005 a feature film. Douglas Adams died May 11, 2001 in Montecito, California, United States.
In this article, we have compiled a collection of famous Douglas Adams quotes and sayings.
80 Douglas Adams Quotes About Life, Science & The Universe
“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“A cup of tea would restore my normality.”― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“Ask a glass of water!” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Ask a glass of water!” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“I don’t want to die now!” he yelled. “I’ve still got a headache! I don’t want to go to heaven with a headache, I’d be all cross and wouldn’t enjoy it!” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“My capacity for happiness,” he added, “you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Life is wasted on the living.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“No,” said the old man, “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“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 Quote
“The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Reality is frequently inaccurate.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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?” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. ” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
‘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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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.”― Douglas Adams Quote
“We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn’t Have A Good Answer To.”― Douglas Adams Quote
“Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“This is rather as if you 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, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.”― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“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.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“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 Quote
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.” ― Douglas Adams Quote
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer” ― Douglas Adams Quote