Douglas Noël Adams was a British comic writer born on March 11, 1952, known for satirizing contemporary life through his works.
His most renowned creation, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is a mock science-fiction series that humorously and pessimistically critiques modern society.
The series originated as a radio program before expanding into a five-book set, selling over 14 million copies internationally.
The books were also adapted for television, theatre, film and even an interactive computer program. Adams, a University of Cambridge alumnus, also wrote for the TV series Doctor Who and scripted for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Beyond the Hitchhiker’s series, Adams also satirized detective fiction with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
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Other notable works include The Meaning of Liff, The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book and Last Chance to See. Adams passed away on May 11, 2001.
Below you will find the best quotes by Douglas Adams.
Insightful and Deep Douglas Adams Quotes
1. “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
2. “You live and learn. At any rate, you live.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
3. “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
4 “Don’t Panic.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
5. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
6. “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
7. “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
8. “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).
9. “Reality is frequently inaccurate.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
10. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
11. “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
12. “There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
13. “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).
14. “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).
15. “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).
16. “A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
17. “It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
18. “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).
19. “Life is wasted on the living.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
20. “The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
Popular Douglas Adams Quotes
21. “To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
22. “We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
23. “42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
24. “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).
25. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
26. “I’d far rather be happy than right any day.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
27. “Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
28. “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
29. “The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
30. “Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
31. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
32. “Earth: mostly harmless.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
33. “It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
34. “If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
35. “In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
36. “We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
Top Douglas Adams Quotes
37. “This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
38. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
39. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
40. “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
41. “Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
42. “Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
43. “A cup of tea would restore my normality.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
44. “Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
45. “Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?” ~ (Douglas Adams).
46. “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).
47. “If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
48. “We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
49. “You can’t dodge your responsibilities by saying they don’t exist!” ~ (Douglas Adams).
50. “Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
51. “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).
Famous Douglas Adams Quotes
52. “We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
53. “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).
54. “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
55. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
56. “Time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of history simultaneously.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
57. “I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
58. “Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
59. “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” ~ (Douglas Adams).
60. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
61. “How do you know you’re having fun if there’s no one watching you have it?” ~ (Douglas Adams).
62. “There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
63. “Democracy is all about not electing the wrong man-eating lizard.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
64. “For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and satisfied, drove on into the night.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
65. “And so the Universe ended.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
Short Douglas Adams Quotes
66. “Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn’t Have A Good Answer To.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
67. “Space is unimaginably big.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
68. “There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they’re not really parallel, and two, they’re not really universes.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
69. “Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
70. “How many roads must a man walk down?” ~ (Douglas Adams).
71. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
72. “The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
73. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
74. “There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
75. “Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?” ~ (Douglas Adams).
76. “You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh Well, business as usual, I suppose.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
77. “I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it’s art while it’s being created.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
78. “It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
79. “Six pints of bitter, said Ford Prefect. And quickly please, the world’s about to end.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
80. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
81. “Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn’t just jump over and have done with it.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
82. “I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you’ve always had.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
83. “It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
84. “I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
85. “Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
Best Douglas Adams Quotes
86. “The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
87. “It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
88. “Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water?” ~ (Douglas Adams).
89. “The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
90. “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).
91. “Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
92. “Beauty doesn’t have to be about anything. What’s a vase about? What’s a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?” ~ (Douglas Adams).
93. “Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
94. “Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
95. “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).
96. “Please call me Eddie if it will help you to relax.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
97. “I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: “Macintosh – We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end”.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
98. “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.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
99. “We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
100. “I think media are at their most interesting before anybody’s thought of calling them art, when people still think they’re just a load of junk.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
101. “Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
102. “If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
103. “You can tune a guitar, but you can’t tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass.” ~ (Douglas Adams).
