Top 624 Quotes & Sayings by Douglas Adams - Page 5

Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off.

Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.

Don't spin your wheels and stress. Take a deep breath, center yourself and make a plan.

The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is...42!

Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.

David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e. that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.

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 it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. 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.

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.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

Ballycumber (ba-li-KUM-ber) n. One of the six half-read books lying somewhere in your bed.

I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.

Time affords us the ability to blame past errors on others while whole heartedly pronouncing our futures successes.

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

Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

The point is, you see," said Ford, "that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.

God's Final Message to His Creation: 'We apologize for the inconvenience.

You barbarians!' he yelled. 'I'll sue the council for every penny it's got! I'll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled...until...until...until...until you've had enough.' Ford was running after him. Very very fast. 'And then I will do it again!' yelled Arthur, 'And when I've finished I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!

And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.

He spent a lot of time flying. He learnt to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.

She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.

The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!

Presidents don't have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it.

I wanted to be John Cleese. It took me some time to realise that the job was taken.

The dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning.

...and the Universe, ... will explode later for your pleasure.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass.

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

Some say that the universe is made so that when we are about to understand it it changes into something even more incomprehensible. And then there are those who say that this has already happened.

How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

Beppu (n.) The triumphant slamming shut of a book after reading the final page.

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.

Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn't work properly yet

The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.

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

It was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.

42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family.

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.

I've never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I've seen a few and they're never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you're in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.

The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.

Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.

"Would you like to see the menu?" he said. "Or would you like to meet the Dish of the Day?" [...] "Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?"

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

Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was. "Is there any tea on this spaceship?" he asked.

Well the hours are good...' ... 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors and never invite them round to dinner.

No. No games. He wanted her and didn't care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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

My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which looks as if it knows where it's going and follow it. I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.

The only thing nicer than a phone that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all) was six phones that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all).

A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn't

Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth it for end users, however much fun it is for nerds.

Goosnargh," said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know what it should be.