Douglas Adams Quotes

A wise man's question contains half the answer.

When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.

People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

My motivation is to get a deeper understanding and exploration of something that I want to know about the human condition. So, that's what I look for in the material I read: if it's asking a genuine question about a concept of the world that interests me. And also, it helps if it's a context that I find interesting.

If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?

There is a profound difference between information and meaning.

The only difference between a problem and a solution is that people understand the solution.

If I knew the answer to that question, I would disclose it.

It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand.

Information doesn't mean a thing to people without inspiration.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

There is truth in all things, if you understand them well.

Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.

If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

I hope we get to the bottom of the answer. It's what I'm interested to know.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

All types of knowledge, ultimately mean self knowledge.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.