The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has enthralled earthlings since 1979. This first publication in Douglas Adams’s beloved science fiction franchise has been a series of broadcasts on BBC Radio, and listening to the audiobook allows you to enjoy the original charm of its talked functionality before publishing.
Here is our selection of the best Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Quotes in life, the universe, and everything.
About The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy series written by the late Douglas Adams. The series consists of five novels, a television series, a radio series, and a feature film. First published in 1979, the series quickly gained a cult following and has since become a classic of the genre.
The story follows the adventures of an unwitting human named Arthur Dent, who is rescued from the destruction of Earth by his friend, Ford Prefect, who is actually an alien and a researcher for the eponymous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a sort of electronic encyclopedia for interstellar travelers.
Together with an array of bizarre and hilarious characters, including the depressed robot Marvin and the two-headed alien Zaphod Beeblebrox, they embark on a series of absurd and often dangerous adventures across the cosmos.
The series is known for its witty humor, satirical commentary on society and culture, and its imaginative and creative world-building. It continues to be beloved by fans of science fiction and comedy alike, and its influence can be seen in many works of popular culture.
Best Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Quotes
For instance, on the planet Earth, the 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
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ― Douglas Adams
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. ― Douglas Adams
I’d far rather be happy than right any day. ― Douglas Adams
Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now? ― Douglas Adams
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. ― Douglas Adams
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? ― Douglas Adams
If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now. ― Douglas Adams
Why, what did she tell you? ― Douglas Adams
I don’t know, I didn’t listen. ― Douglas Adams
This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays. ― Douglas Adams
So this is it, said Arthur, We are going to die. ― Douglas Adams
Yes, said Ford, except… no! Wait a minute! He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. What’s this switch? he cried. ― Douglas Adams
What? Where? cried Arthur, twisting round. ― Douglas Adams
“No, I was only fooling,” said Ford, “we are going to die after all.” ― Douglas Adams
‘You know,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s at times like this when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ‘Why, what did she tell you?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t listen.’ ― Douglas Adams
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t. ― Douglas Adams
This planet has or rather had a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole, it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. ― Douglas Adams
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious. ― Douglas Adams
Here, for whatever reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it. ― Douglas Adams
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. ― Douglas Adams
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. ― Douglas Adams
‘Did I do anything wrong today,’ he said, ‘or has the world always been like this and I’ve been too wrapped up in myself to notice?’ ― Douglas Adams
What is it? The girls? The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find that coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge? ― Douglas Adams
My capacity for happiness…you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first. ― Douglas Adams
Reality is frequently inaccurate. ― Douglas Adams
The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ ― Douglas Adams
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. ― Douglas Adams
All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was. ― Douglas Adams
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. ― Douglas Adams
So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means. ― Douglas Adams
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. ― Douglas Adams
Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. ― Douglas Adams
I don’t know what I’m looking for… I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn’t be able to look for them. ― Douglas Adams
Ford… you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it. ― Douglas Adams
The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every Sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. ― Douglas Adams
…it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand to hand combat; wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. ― Douglas Adams
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. ― Douglas Adams
It is known that there is 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. ― Douglas Adams
“Hence a phrase which has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in ‘Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.’ (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)” ― Douglas Adams
Many were increasing 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.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. ― Douglas Adams
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?
At first, Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation, he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while, he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical. ― Douglas Adams
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. ― Douglas Adams
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. ― Douglas Adams
The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. Make it evil, he’d been told. Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them.
If that means sticking all sorts of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with. ― Douglas Adams
“The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.” ― Douglas Adams
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. ― Douglas Adams
There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.
The moment passed as it regularly did on Sqornshellous Zeta, without incident. ― Douglas Adams
If you’d like to know, I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability.
After that, it gets a bit complicated, and there’s all sort of stuff going on in dimensions thirteen to twenty two that you really wouldn’t want to know about. 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. I can easily not say words like damn if it offends you. ― Douglas Adams
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul. ― Douglas Adams
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying And another thing… twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument. ― Douglas Adams
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. ― Douglas Adams
Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off. Zaphod ― Douglas Adams
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack for flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties. ― Douglas Adams
He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off. ― Douglas Adams
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. The effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.” ― Douglas Adams
“My doctor says that I have a malformed public duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fiber and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.” ― Douglas Adams
The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth—when there had been an Earth before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass—the problem had been with cars.
The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with, and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another—particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish. ― Douglas Adams
If you’re a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it.
Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes.
Let me see what it says in this edition, then. I’ve got to see it.
… What? Harmless! Is that all it’s got to say? Harmless! One word! … Well, for God’s sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.
Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it’s still an improvement.
And what does it say now? asked Arthur.
Mostly harmless, admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed cough. ― Douglas Adams
It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. ― Douglas Adams
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God. ― Douglas Adams
Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich. ― Douglas Adams
‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ ― Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. The effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick. ― Douglas Adams
Best Arthur Dent Quotes
My God, they are! They’re knocking my house down. What the hell am I doing in the pub, Ford? – Arthur Dent.
I wonder who this ship belongs to anyway. – Arthur Dent.
Is there any tea on this spaceship? – Arthur Dent.
Yes, I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’. – Arthur Dent.
Why don’t people get rid of the lizards? – Arthur Dent.
You mean, it comes from a world of lizards? – Arthur Dent.
“Ford! there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.” – Arthur Dent.
It’s at times like this when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse. – Arthur Dent.
I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young. – Arthur Dent.
I thought you said it was a democracy. – Arthur Dent.
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.
FAQs
How many books are in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series?
There are five books in the series: “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, “Life, the Universe and Everything”, “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”, and “Mostly Harmless”.
Is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy only a book series?
No, the series has been adapted into various forms of media, including a radio series, a television series, a feature film, and even a video game.
What is the significance of the number 42 in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
The significance of the number 42 in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a long-standing joke and an example of Douglas Adams’ quirky and irreverent sense of humor. In the story, the number 42 is presented as the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” as calculated by a supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years.
Conclusion
In conclusion, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is known for its witty and memorable quotes, which have become a part of popular culture. From the famous “Don’t Panic” advice on the cover of the titular guidebook to the many hilarious and thought-provoking observations made by the characters throughout the series, the quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy have a charm and appeal that has endured for decades.
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