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Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless
Sep 12, 2025
"What's up?" "I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."
Shee, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off.
Life,” said Marvin dolefully, “loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.
Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
Who is this god person anyway?
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.
It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.
The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
And wow! Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like... ow... ound... round... ground! That's it! That's a good name - ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?
If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
Life! Don't talk to me about life!
I'm up to here with cool, okay? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them 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 the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.
The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.
That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.
Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.
Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
One nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of the most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow pizza.
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
God's Final Message to His Creation: 'We apologize for the inconvenience.
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is...42!
Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors and never invite them round to dinner.
Names are not always what they seem.
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
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.