Top 450 Douglas Adams Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.”

— Douglas Adams

402. “Plenty of people didn’t care for him much, but 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. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.”

— Douglas Adams

403. “The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.”

— Douglas Adams

404. “The man, he believed with an instant effortlessness which would have impressed even a Scientologist, must be a God of some kind to arouse such fervour.”

— Douglas Adams

405. “Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, “popular” was hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular – everyone slows down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames. Infamous was more like it. Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.”

— Douglas Adams

406. “The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors.”

— Douglas Adams

407. “If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly. The question was how?”

— Douglas Adams

408. “She remembered wondering what it was that the Albanians exported in such an anonymous way, but when on one occasion she had looked it up, she found that their only export was electricity – which, if she remembered her high school physics correctly, was unlikely to be moved around in lorries.”

— Douglas Adams

409. “Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul.”

— Douglas Adams

410. “This Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition is a highly significant one in the history of Introductions. Its presence on these pages means that this book has achieved the World Record for the Number of Introductions in a Book of This Nature.”

— Douglas Adams

411. “In other words – and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxywide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”

— Douglas Adams

412. “He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief?”

— Douglas Adams

413. “We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do.”

— Douglas Adams

414. “He put some more cold pizza into his face.”

— Douglas Adams

415. “Now. Having saved the entire human race from extinction I could do with a pizza. What say you to such a proposal?”

— Douglas Adams

416. “It may not be terribly important that from five thousand miles away you can reach into a university corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can, but it’s the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.”

— Douglas Adams

417. “Bianchi lenzuoli irlandesi, appena inamidati, puliti, stirati, ben rimboccati – questi aggettivi erano per lui come una litania di desiderio. Da secoli nulla l’aveva attratto come ora le lenzuola. Non riusciva assolutamente a concepire come si potesse desiderare qualcos’altro. Lenzuola. E dormire. Dormire e lenzuola. Dormire nelle lenzuola. Dormire.”

— Douglas Adams

418. “Any time you see a film or TV show or a commercial that features someone dressed up as an animal, it’s probably Todd inside. “I was in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” he told me. “Guess,” he added, “which one I was.”

— Douglas Adams

419. “Well, that was another thing that hadn’t changed. Some people pick their noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets.”

— Douglas Adams

420. “It was odd, Kate reflected, that people who needed to bully you were the easiest to push around.”

— Douglas Adams

421. “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i – “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i – “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i –.”

— Douglas Adams

422. “It seems odd, don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely with the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary heights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness.”

— Douglas Adams

423. “Of course, the computer isn’t any of these things. These are all things we were previously familiar with from the real world, which we have modelled in the computer so that we can use the damn thing. Which should tell us something interesting. The computer is actually a modelling device.”

— Douglas Adams

424. “As if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules.”

— Douglas Adams

425. “This was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all.”

— Douglas Adams

426. “MacDuff I knew at Cambridge.” “Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.” “Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey – a non-preying mantis if you like. A sort of pleasant genial mantis that’s given up preying and taken up tennis instead.”

— Douglas Adams

427. “Between you and me, sir, I would’ve been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.”

— Douglas Adams

428. “Wandering around the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it.”

— Douglas Adams

429. “But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn’t have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fiberoptics. It’s communication between us that forms the fourth age of sand.”

— Douglas Adams

430. “So you see, the major difference between someone of my age and someone of yours is not how much I know, but how much I’ve forgotten.”

— Douglas Adams

431. “Very strange people, physicists,” he said as soon as they were outside again. “In my experience the ones who aren’t actually dead are in some way very ill.”

— Douglas Adams

432. “A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey – a non-preying mantis if you like.”

— Douglas Adams

433. “The little book of instructions suggested that he should simply concentrate ‘soulfully’ on the question which was ‘besieging’ him, write it down, ponder on it, enjoy the silence, and then once he had achieved inner harmony and tranquillity he should push the red button. There wasn’t a red button, but there was a blue button marked ‘Red’, and this Dirk took to be the one.”

— Douglas Adams

434. “Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

— Douglas Adams

435. “It meant that the silently waged conflict between himself and his cleaning lady had escalated to a new and more frightening level. It was now, Dirk reckoned, fully three months since this fridge door had been opened, and each of them was grimly determined not to be the one to open it first.”

— Douglas Adams

436. “If you’ve done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”

— Douglas Adams

437. “In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some.”

— Douglas Adams

438. “There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.”

— Douglas Adams

439. “His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did keep him on the move.”

— Douglas Adams

440. “A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

— Douglas Adams

441. “A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. Learn to be one with the joy of the moment.”

— Douglas Adams

442. “The mice will see you now,” he said.”

— Douglas Adams

443. “Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape.”

— Douglas Adams

444. “She had nearly said, “Over what?,” but at that moment she realized that if she said that she would have to listen to his reply, which would be bound to infuriate her into arguing back. It occurred to her for the first time that the only way of escaping was just not to get drawn into these arguments. If she simply did not respond this time, then she was free to leave. She tried it. She felt a sudden freedom. She left. A week later, in much the.”

— Douglas Adams

445. “You see what I have done?′ he asked the ceiling, which seemed to flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation.”

— Douglas Adams

446. “Charming man,” he said. “I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one...”

— Douglas Adams

447. “The phone wavered in Richard’s hand. He was holding it about half an inch away from his ear anyway because it seemed that somebody had dipped the earpiece in some chow mein recently, but that wasn’t so bad. It was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all.”

— Douglas Adams

448. “He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass the time.”

— Douglas Adams

449. “You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”

— Douglas Adams

450. “There was a distinct absence of anything female in the room – the same sort of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it on a wall.”

— Douglas Adams