Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the absurdity of our everyday perceptions in the face of the vastness of the universe.
Douglas Adams reflects on the extraordinary nature of human existence within the cosmos. By emphasizing that we live on a seemingly ordinary planet while it orbits a massive star surrounded by incomprehensible distances, he suggests that our perception of reality may often overlook the sheer complexity and wonder of the universe. This quote urges us to question our perspectives and recognize the remarkable circumstances of our existence.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on the importance of scientific exploration, you might use this quote to illustrate how unusual our perspective is.
More from Douglas Adams
All quotes →"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
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.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
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No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.
One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year.
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.
There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, and sand eddies in a whirlwind.