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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All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?
Whoever cultivates the golden mean avoids both the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.
A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they're so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs.Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I've been pretty messed up, a mess pretty much.
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Canada's eminent position today is a tribute to the patience, tolerance, and strength of character of her people, of both French and British strains. For Canada is enriched by the heritage of France as well as of Britain, and Quebec has imparted the vitality and spirit of France itself to Canada. Canada's notable achievement of national unity and progress through accommodation, moderation and forbearance can be studied with profit by her sister nations.