Douglas Adams Quotes

376 Sourced Quotes

If there was one thing life had taught her it was that there are times when you do not go back for your bag and times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasion.

Douglas Adams
It is most gratifying," it said, "that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives... thank you.

Douglas Adams
I do love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go past.

Douglas Adams
"Stotting" is jumping upward with all four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you've seen a large black poodle stotting in the snow.

Douglas Adams
Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

Douglas Adams
The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot, and then a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.

Douglas Adams
If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

Douglas Adams
The usual people tried to claim responsibility.
First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all.

Douglas Adams
Very deep. You should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you.

Douglas Adams
Always expecting this and expecting that. May I recommend serenity to you? A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. Learn to be one with the joy of the moment.

Douglas Adams
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.

Douglas Adams
Marvin trudged on down the corridor, still moaning. "...and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side..." "No?" said Arthur grimly as he walked along beside him. "Really?" "Oh yes," said Marvin, "I mean I've asked for them to be replaced but no one ever listens." "I can imagine.

Douglas Adams
The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

Douglas Adams
But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving

Douglas Adams
And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before—and thus was the Empire forged.

Douglas Adams
He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.

Douglas Adams
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.

Douglas Adams
He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day.

Douglas Adams
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.

Douglas Adams
I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say.

Douglas Adams
Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.

Douglas Adams
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
That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ulimate it.

Douglas Adams
The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules

Douglas Adams
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

Douglas Adams
High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.

Douglas Adams
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
And we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere … and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

Douglas Adams
What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day.

Douglas Adams
... my methods of navigation have their advantage. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Douglas Adams