Quotes About Perspective

And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

Well the hours are good...' ... 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

The chances of finding out what's really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.

It gives me my headache just trying to think down to your level

Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots

I've never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I've seen a few and they're never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you're in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.

Sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.

When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.

It's part of the shape of the Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me.

No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem.

The Universe is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore. Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.

The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.

All right, said Ford. How would you react if I said that I'm not from Guildford at all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse? Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. I don't know, he said, taking a pull of beer. Why, do you think it's the sort of thing you're likely to say? Ford gave up. It really wasn't worth bothering at the moment, what with the world being about to end.

I live in what are known as hopes. I hope for fascinating and remunerative cases, my secretary hopes that I will pay her, her landlord hopes that she will produce some rent, the Electricity Board hopes that he will settle their bill, and so on. I find it a wonderfully optimistic way of life.

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.

Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

he found the idea of someone who was not only privileged, but was also sorry for himself because he thought the world didn't really understand the problems of privileged people, deeply obnoxious.

My capacity for happiness,' he added, 'you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.

Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, 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—while 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.

Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?

Three pints?" said Arthur. "At lunchtime?" The man next to Ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.