Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Douglas Adams (British Author)

Douglas Adams (1952–2001,) fully Douglas Noël Adams, was an English novelist and scriptwriter. He is best known for the mock science-fiction parodies that lampoon modern society with biting humor and pessimism. Known collectively as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, his works satirized contemporary life through a luckless protagonist who deals ineptly with societal forces beyond his control.

Born in Cambridge, Adams received an M.A. (1974) in English literature from the University of Cambridge, where he wrote comedy sketches for the performing arts society. He was a writer and script editor for the television series Doctor Who and wrote scripts for the BBC 1978–80.

Adams is best known for his humorous radio series (later adapted for television and film,) The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which he also wrote as a sequence of novels: The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979,) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980,) Life, the Universe and Everything (1982,) So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984,) and Mostly Harmless (1992.) The five-book series sold more than 14 million copies internationally. The Hitchhiker’s Guide was adapted for television, theatre, and film and was used as the basis of an interactive computer program.

Adams also wrote Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988,) which satirizes the detective story genre. His other works include The Meaning of Liff (1983,) The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book (1986,) and Last Chance to See (1990.)

Nick Webb wrote the official biography Wish You Were Here (2003.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Douglas Adams

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Goals

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
Topics: Learning, Experience

2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change.
—Douglas Adams

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
—Douglas Adams

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

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

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Possibilities

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 drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Space

Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Gossip, Light, Speed

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
Topics: Life

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Responsibility

It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not everyone 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 if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: The Universe

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Time, Illusion, One liners

A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’
—Douglas Adams

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Self-Discovery, Journeys

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Foolishness, Design, Trying

So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Perception

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
Topics: Just for Fun, Writing

We demand guaranteed rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Uncertainty

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Opinions

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Life

One always overcompensates for disabilities. I’m thinking of having my entire body surgically removed.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Disability

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
Topics: Atheism

If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.
—Douglas Adams

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 wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Money, Evils

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Humanity, Humankind

We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works.
—Douglas Adams

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second- rate technology, led them into it in the first place.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Computers

One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work – supposing you’re trying to find out how a cat works—you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you’ve got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn’t a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Cats

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
Topics: Atheism

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *