“All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.” 

“We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.” 

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” 

“Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.” 

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” 

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” 

“There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.” 

“Reality is frequently inaccurate.” 

“I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” 

Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

“If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.” 

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” 

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” 

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” 

“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second” 

“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” 

“As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!” 

“What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose.” 

“A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.” 

“Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.” 

“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.” 

“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.” 

“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”