Quotes from Mostly Harmless

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“Anything that happens, happens.

Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.

It doesn’t necessarily do it in chronological order, though.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“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.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“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 of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself."

"Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“What was the self-sacrifice?"
I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes."
Why was that self-sacrifice?"
Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly.
I think we have different value systems."
Well mine's better.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“I begged her, 'Please don't leave me stranded in the middle of some primitive zarking forest with no medical help and a head injury. I could be in serious trouble and so could she.'"
"What did she say?"
"She hit me on the head with the rock again," Ford responded curtly.
"I think i can confirm that was my daughter."
"Sweet kid."
"You have to get to know her," said Arthur.
"She eases up, does she?"
"No, but you get a better sense of when to duck.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“I think we have different value systems." —Arthur
"Well mine's better." —Ford”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“Sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“You know,' he said, sitting back, reflectively, 'it's at times like this that you kind of wonder if it's worth worrying about the fabric of space-time and the causal integrity of the multidimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all waveforms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that's been bugging me.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“He had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“NO ADMITTANCE.
NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL.
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.
GO AWAY.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“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, quote from Mostly Harmless

“Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyways, so their opinion can and should be discounted.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you do with the recipe? She didn't know.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“Every single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some doors and closes many others. Most of them we don't notice. Some we do.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“— Къщата край морето не е просто недвижима собственост. Това е състояние на ума [...].
— Къщата край морето — продължи старецът, — дори не е нужно да е край морето. Макар че най-хубавите са там. Всички ние обичаме да се събираме при гранични обстоятелства [...].
— Там, където сушата и водата се срещат. Където земята се среща с въздуха, където тялото се среща с ума. Където пространството се среща с времето. Обичаме да седим от едната страна и да гледаме другата.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“— Идваш при мен за съвет, а не можеш да понесеш нищо, което не ти е познато. Хъм… Значи трябва да ти кажа нещо, което вече знаеш, но да ти го кажа така, че да ти се стори новост, а?”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

“The word was out that maybe, just maybe, a British accent would fit. The hair, the skin tone and the bridgework would have to be up to American network standards, but there had been a lot of British accents up there thanking their mothers for their Oscars, a lot of British accents singing on Broadway, and some unusually big audiences tuning in to British accents in wig on Masterpiece Theatre.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Mostly Harmless

About the author

Popular quotes

“...no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.”
― Peter S. Beagle, quote from The Last Unicorn

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Julius Caesar

“I can’t… I find that I can’t concentrate. On anything. I can’t really…” Rhage’s eyes drifted to Zsadist. “How do you live with it? All the anger. The pain. The…”
― J.R. Ward, quote from Lover Eternal

“According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”
― Abraham Verghese, quote from Cutting for Stone

“No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Speaker for the Dead

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.