Douglas Adams Quotes

Sensation is amphibious: at the same time it joins us to and divides us from things. It is the door through which we enter into things but also through which we come out of them and realize that we are not things.

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Sense is a line, the mind is a circle. Sense is like a line which is the flux of a point running out from itself, but intellect like a circle that keeps within itself.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

We require, as a species, the difference between what is safe and unsafe to define ourselves. Be it in darkness or in light, where we are means nothing without the comparison to the other place - where we are not. And thus it is the difference between them that tells us who and what we are.

Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality.

Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.

Windows work two ways, mirrors one way. You never walk through mirrors or swim through windows.

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--

You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.

Times don't change. Men do.

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine

Interesting things happen along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the same.

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.

We're cognizant, curious beings, capable of philosophical thought, nuclear physics, repeating Nerf weapons, global consciousness, Glade air fresheners, and sentient automobiles. But we're assholes first.

I’ve always felt that night doesn’t fall. Night rises.

If you were a cloud, and sailed up there, You'd sail on water as blue as air, And you'd see me here in the fields and say: 'Doesn't the sky look green today?

Look. We both know life is short, Macy. Too short to waste a single second with anyone who doesn't appreciate and value you." You said the other day life was long," I shot back. "Which is it?" It's both," she said, shrugging. "It all depends on how you choose to live it. It's like forever, always changing." Nothing can be two opposite things at once," I said. "It's impossible." No," she replied, squeezing my hand, "what's impossible is that we actually think it could be anything OTHER than that.

Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.