Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there . . . what then? The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the idea of belief and the persistence of faith despite contradictory evidence.
In this quote, Douglas Adams explores the concept of belief and its importance in human experience. He suggests that belief can exist independently of reality; even if the object of one's belief is absent or non-existent, the act of believing itself holds significance. This speaks to the human tendency to maintain faith in ideals or concepts that provide comfort and meaning, regardless of the evidence that might suggest otherwise.
Themes
BeliefFaithTruthRealityPerception
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the power of belief in overcoming challenges.
More from Douglas Adams
All quotes →"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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