Do you know where you towel is?

Happy Towel Day!

May 25 honors the works and life of Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of the best books ever written.

In honor of the day, I’m providing some quotes from the Hitchiker’s Series. I could have listed many more, but I tried to pick my absolute favorite (it wasn’t easy.) If you have a favorite one that I didn’t include, please share. The books were written a long time ago, but these quotes are relevant today.

Some Quotes Worth Memorizing While Finding Your Towel:

• Don’t Panic.
• There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
• “You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
  “Why, what did she tell you?”
  “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”
• “Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
• 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 — whilst 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.
• “Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
• The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
• “Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
• It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this, it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
• There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
• It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.