Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.

Douglas Adams

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Douglas Adams

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

Douglas Adams

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.

Douglas Adams

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

Douglas Adams

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

Douglas Adams

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

Douglas Adams

Now, 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 that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and 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; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!

Douglas Adams

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

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

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

Douglas Adams

But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

‘It seemed to me,’ said Wonko the Sane, ‘that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane’.

Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

A beach house isn’t just real estate. It’s a state of mind.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.

Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

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.

Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you’re doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

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, Last Chance to See

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, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

If the universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if its done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make. That isn’t to say if you get involved in a paradox a few things won’t strike you as being very odd, but if you’ve got through life without that already happening to you, then I don’t know which universe you’ve been living in, but it isn’t this one.

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

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, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The rest of you… keep banging the rocks together

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The simple truth is that interstellar distance will not fit the human imagination.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Universe is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In the beginning the Universe was created.

This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Here, for whatever reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt