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
The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The universe is vast and overwhelming, and many choose to overlook this reality for their own peace of mind.
Douglas Adams highlights the daunting scale of the universe, suggesting that its enormity can be unsettling for individuals. To maintain a sense of normalcy and tranquility in life, many people consciously choose to ignore or downplay the enormity of existence, which raises questions about human nature, awareness, and coping mechanisms in the face of overwhelming reality.
Themes
UniverseIgnoranceVastnessRealityHuman Nature
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture about existentialism, one might quote this to emphasize the scale of the universe.
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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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