Douglas Noel Adams Quotes (30 Quotes)


    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.

    Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years.

    He inched his way up the corridor as if he would rather be yarding his way down it....

    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.

    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.


    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.

    The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or.

    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 movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it was not the small pieces of paper that were unhappy.

    The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phase, 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.

    Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor at least no one worth speaking of.

    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.


    There is a theory that states 'If anyone finds out what the universe is for it will disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable.' There is another theory that states 'This has already happened....'

    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.

    'Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from knowing there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about them. Amen' That's it. It's what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you might as well have it out in the open. 'Lord, Lord, Lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.' And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part.

    Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in fact very easy.

    Oh freddled gruntbuggly Thy micturations are to me As plurdled gabbleblotchits On a lurgid bee. Groop I implore thee My foonting turlingdromes And hooptiously drangle me With crinkly bindlewurdles. Or I will rend thee In the gobberwarts With my blurglecruncheon See if I don't.

    Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didnt know you had a twin brother or sister.

    His study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.

    Plenty of people did not care for him much, but then there is a huge difference between disliking somebody maybe even disliking them a lot and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire.

    Nothing travels faster than the speed of light except for bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

    If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there ... what then The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not.

    In cases of major discrepancy its always reality thats got it wrong ... reality is frequently inaccurate.

    He shifted his weight from foot to foot, but it was equally uncomfortable on each.

    Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally uned-up personality.

    Life ... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

    It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an airport' appear.

    If human beings dont keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they dont keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

    Come, let us go. Let us leave this festering hellhole. 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.

    Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.


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