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Time Travel, By Its Very Nature, Was Invented In All Periods Of History Simultaneously.
-Douglas Adams
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Time Travel, By Its

Douglas Adams
...
Time Travel, By Its Very Nature, Was Invented In All Periods Of History Simultaneously.

Understanding the Quote: "time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of..."

This quote by Douglas Adams reflects deeply on the theme of time travel. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Time Travel, Periods, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Douglas Adams interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams is celebrated for insightful thoughts on time travel and periods. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

Views: 68011
Topic
Time Travel
Periods
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Sky
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Cities
Smell
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Way
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Two
Knowing
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Loss
Men
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Couple
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Technology
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The Dew Has Fallen With A Particularly Sickening Thud This Morning.
Morning
Dew
Fallen
I Watched The Gorilla's Eyes Again, Wise And Knowing Eyes, And Wondered About This Business Of Trying To Teach Apes Language. Our Language. Why? There Are Many Members Of Our Own Species Who Live In And With The Forest And Know It And Understand It. We Don't Listen To Them. What Is There To Suggest We Would Listen To Anything An Ape Could Tell Us? Or That It Would Be Able To Tell Us Of Its Life In A Language That Hasn't Been Born Of That Life? I Thought, Maybe It Is Not That They Have Yet To Gain A Language, It Is That We Have Lost One.
Wise
Eye
Lost Ones
He Picked Up The Letter Q And Hurled It Into A Distant Privet Bush Where It Hit A Young Rabbit. The Rabbit Hurtled Off In Terror And Didn’t Stop Till It Was Set Upon And Eaten By A Fox Which Choked On One Of Its Bones And Died On The Bank Of A Stream Which Subsequently Washed It Away. During The Following Weeks Ford Perfect Swallowed His Pride And Struck Up A Relationship With A Girl Who Had Been A Personnel Officer On Golgafrincham, And He Was Terribly Upset When She Suddenly Passed Away As A Result Of Drinking Water From A Pool That Had Been Polluted By The Body Of A Dead Fox.
Girl
Drinking
Pride
Come On,” He Droned, “i’ve Been Ordered To Take You Down To The Bridge. Here I Am, Brain The Size Of A Planet And They Ask Me To Take You Down To The Bridge. Call That Job Satisfaction? ’cos I Don’t.” He Turned And Walked Back To The Hated Door. “er, Excuse Me,” Said Ford Following After Him, “which Government Owns This Ship?” Marvin Ignored Him. “you Watch This Door,” He Muttered, “it’s About To Open Again. I Can Tell By The Intolerable Air Of Smugness It Suddenly Generates.
Jobs
Government
Air
Their Minds Sang With The Ecstatic Knowledge That Either What They Were Doing Was Completely And Utterly And Totally Impossible Or That Physics Had A Lot Of Catching Up To Do.
Science
Mind
Impossible
A Life That Is Burdened With Expectations Is A Heavy Life. Its Fruit Is Sorrow And Disappointment.
Disappointment
Expectations
Sorrow
Time Travel, By Its Very Nature, Was Invented In All Periods Of History Simultaneously.
Time Travel
Periods
Some Say That The Universe Is Made So That When We Are About To Understand It It Changes Into Something Even More Incomprehensible. And Then There Are Those Who Say That This Has Already Happened.
Made
Happened
Universe
Was There A Reason Behind It? There Would Be No Point In Asking Zaphod, He Never Appeared To Have A Reason For Anything He Did At All: He Had Turned Unfathomability Into An Art Form. He Attacked Everything In Life With A Mixture Of Extraordinary Genius And Naive Incompetence And It Was Often Difficult To Tell Which Was Which.
Art
Would Be
Genius
Oh Dear,' Says God, 'i Hadn't Thought Of That,' And Promptly Vanishes In A Puff Of Logic.
Puff
Hitchhiking
Logic
It's Guff. It Doesn't Advance The Action. It Makes For Nice Fat Books Such As The American Market Thrives On, But It Doesn't Actually Get You Anywhere.
Nice
Book
Action
I Begged Her, 'please Don't Leave Me Stranded In The Middle Of Some Primitive Zarking Forest With No Medical Help And A Head Injury. I Could Be In Serious Trouble And So Could She.'" "what Did She Say?" "she Hit Me On The Head With The Rock Again," Ford Responded Curtly. "i Think I Can Confirm That Was My Daughter." "sweet Kid." "you Have To Get To Know Her," Said Arthur. "she Eases Up, Does She?" "no, But You Get A Better Sense Of When To Duck.
Daughter
Sweet
Kids
And For All The Richest And Most Successful Merchants Life Inevitably Became Rather Dull And Niggly, And They Began To Imagine That This Was Therefore The Fault Of The Worlds They'd Settled On.
Successful
Boredom
Dull
42 Is A Nice Number That You Can Take Home And Introduce To Your Family.
Nice
Home
Numbers
I've Come Up With A Set Of Rules That Describe Our Reactions To Technologies: 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. Anything Invented After You're Thirty-five Is Against The Natural Order Of Things.
Technology
Order
Careers
And Then I Decided I Was A Lemon For A Couple Of Weeks.
Couple
Gin And Tonic
Week
It Is A Well-known Fact That Those People Who Must Want To Rule People Are, Ipso Facto, Those Least Suited To Do It... Anyone Who Is Capable Of Getting Themselves Made President Should On No Account Be Allowed To Do The Job.
Jobs
People
President
In Many Of The More Relaxed Civilizations On The Outer Eastern Rim Of The Galaxy, The Hitch-hiker's Guide Has Already Supplanted The Great Encyclopaedia Galactica As The Standard Repository Of All Knowledge And Wisdom, For Though It Has Many Omissions And Contains Much That Is Apocryphal, Or At Least Wildly Inaccurate, It Scores Over The Older, More Pedestrian Work In Two Important Respects. First, It Is Slightly Cheaper; And Secondly It Has The Words Don't Panic Inscribed In Large Friendly Letters On Its Cover.
Civilization
Two
Omission
The Longest And Most Destructive Party Ever Held Is Now Into Its Fourth Generation And Still No One Shows Any Signs Of Leaving. The Problem Of When The Drink Is Going To Run Out Is, However, Going To Have To Be Faced One Day. The Planet Over Which They Are Floating Is No Longer The Planet It Was When They First Started Floating Over It. It Is In Bad Shape
Running
Future
Party
Dirk Was, For One Of The Few Times In A Life Of Exuberantly Prolific Loquacity, Wordless.
I Seem To Be Having Tremendous Difficulty With My Life-style
Style
Difficulty
Life Style
The Invention Of The Scientific Method And Science Is, I'm Sure We'll All Agree, The Most Powerful Intellectual Idea, The Most Powerful Framework For Thinking And Investigating And Understanding And Challenging The World Around Us That There Is, And It Rests On The Premise That Any Idea Is There To Be Attacked. If It Withstands The Attack Then It Lives To Fight Another Day And If It Doesn't Withstand The Attack Then Down It Goes. Religion Doesn't Seem To Work Like That.
Life
Powerful
Hard Work
Assumptions Are What We Don't Know We Are Making
Assumption
Knows
He Didn't Know Why He Had Become President Of The Galaxy, Except That It Seemed A Fun Thing To Be.
Fun
President
Galaxy
These Creatures You Call Mice, You See, They Are Not Quite As They Appear. They Are Merely The Protrusion Into Our Dimension Of Vastly Hyperintelligent Pandimensional Beings.
Dimensions
Mice
Creatures
The Problem Is, Or Rather One Of The Problems, For There Are Many, A Sizeable Proportion Of Which Are Continually Clogging Up The Civil, Commercial, And Criminal Courts In All Areas Of The Galaxy, And Especially, Where Possible, The More Corrupt Ones, This. The Previous Sentence Makes Sense. That Is Not The Problem. This Is: Change. Read It Through Again And You'll Get It.
Clogging Up
Criminals
Problem
I Was Created To Fulfill A Function And I Failed In It. I Negated My Own Existence.
Function
Existence
My Own
We Demand Rigidly Defined Areas Of Doubt And Uncertainty!
Humorous
Profound
Doubt
In The End, It Was The Sunday Afternoons He Couldn't Cope With, And That Terrible Listlessness That Starts To Set In About 2:55, When You Know You've Taken All The Baths That You Can Usefully Take That Day, That However Hard You Stare At Any Given Paragraph In The Newspaper You Will Never Actually Read It, Or Use The Revolutionary New Pruning Technique It Describes, And That As You Stare At The Clock The Hands Will Move Relentlessly On To Four O'clock, And You Will Enter The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul.
Moving
Sunday
Dark
You Live And Learn. At Any Rate, You Live.
Wise
Funny Life
Short Life
Time Affords Us The Ability To Blame Past Errors On Others While Whole Heartedly Pronouncing Our Futures Successes.
Past
Errors
Blame
He Had Got Himself A Life. Now He Had To Find A Purpose In It.
Purpose
Ford... You're Turning Into A Penguin. Stop It.
Penguins
Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy
Hitchhikers Guide
The Idea That Bill Gates (one Of The Founders Of Microsoft) Has Appeared Like A Knight In Shining Armour To Lead All Customers Out Of A Mire Of Technological Chaos Neatly Ignores The Fact That It Was He, By Peddling Second Rate Technology, Led Them Into It In The First Place...
Funny
Humor
Technology
I Like The Cover," He Said. "don't Panic. It's The First Helpful Or Intelligible Thing Anybody's Said To Me All Day.
Intelligence
Panic
Firsts
First We Thought The Pc Was A Calculator. Then We Found Out How To Turn Numbers Into Letters With Ascii — And We Thought It Was A Typewriter. Then We Discovered Graphics, And We Thought It Was A Television. With The World Wide Web, We've Realized It's A Brochure.
Technology
Typewriters
Discovery
What Is The Point? We Assume That Every Time We Do Anything We Know What The Consequences Will Be, I.e., More Or Less What We Intend Them To Be. This Is Not Only Not Always Correct. It Is Wildly, Crazily, Stupidly, Cross-eyed-blithering-insectly Wrong!
Assuming
Crosses
Knows
High On A Rocky Promontory Sat An Electric Monk On A Bored Horse.
Horse
Bored
Monk
Anything That Happens, Happens. Anything That, In Happening, Causes Something Else To Happen, Causes Something Else To Happen. Anything That, In Happening, Causes Itself To Happen Again, Happens Again. It Doesn’t Necessarily Do It In Chronological Order, Though.
Order
Causes
Happens
'the Difficulty With This Conversation,' Said Arthur After A Sort Of Pondering Look Had Crawled Slowly Across His Face Like A Mountaineer Negotiating A Tricky Outcrop, 'is That It's Very Different From Most Of The Ones I've Had Of Late. Which, As I Explained, Have Mostly Been With Trees.'
Tree
Different
Conversation
So, The World Is Fine. We Don’t Have To Save The World—the World Is Big Enough To Look After Itself. What We Have To Be Concerned About, Is Whether Or Not The World We Live In, Will Be Capable Of Sustaining Us In It. That’s What We Need To Think About.
Thinking
Needs
Looks
It's Part Of The Shape Of The Universe. I Only Have To Talk To Somebody And They Begin To Hate Me.
Hate
Shapes
Marvin
Alltami (n.) The Ancient Art Of Being Able To Balance The Hot And Cold Shower Taps.
Art
Hot And Cold
Balance
If There's Any Real Truth, It's That The Entire Multidimensional Infinity Of The Universe Is Almost Certainly Being Run By A Bunch Of Maniacs.
Running
Real
Infinity
The Great Thing About Being The Only Species That Makes A Distinction Between Right And Wrong Is That We Can Make Up The Rules For Ourselves As We Go Along.
Crazy
Mad
Distinction
A Learning Experience Is One Of Those Things That Says, 'you Know That Thing You Just Did? Don't Do That.
Life
Regret
Mistake
The Light Works," He Said, Indicating The Window, "the Gravity Works," He Said, Dropping A Pencil On The Floor. "anything Else We Have To Take Our Chances With.
Light
Chance
Window
When The Idea Comes, I Often Can't Remember Where It Came From. I Remember Very Little About Writing The First Series Of Hitchhiker's. It's Almost As If Someone Else Wrote It.
Writing
Ideas
Often Can
Far Out In The Uncharted Backwaters Of The Unfashionable End Of The Western Spiral Arm Of The Galaxy Lies A Small Unregarded Yellow Pizza.
Lying
Yellow
Hitchhiking
Here, For Whatever Reason, Is The World. And Here It Stays. With Me On It.
World
Reason
Stay With Me
You Come To Me For Advice, But You Can't Cope With Anything You Don't Recognize. Hmmm. So We'll Have To Tell You Something You Already Know But Make It Sound Like News, Eh Well, Business As Usual , I Suppose.
Advice
Sound
Usual
It's Good To Leave Your Room Super-messy When You're Away. Whoever Tries To Break Into Your Room Will Thought It Has Already Been Ransacked.
Trying
Rooms
Break
If It Looks Like A Duck, And Quacks Like A Duck, We Have At Least To Consider The Possibility That We Have A Small Aquatic Bird Of The Family Anatidae On Our Hands.
Family
Integrity
Patriotic
The Electric Monk Was A Labour-saving Device, Like A Dishwasher Or A Video Recorder... Electric Monks Believed Things For You, Thus Saving You What Was Becoming An Increasingly Onerous Task, That Of Believing All The Things The World Expected You To Believe.
Believe
Tasks
Video
I Don't Really Have Any Advice, Other Than To Say It's The Most Appallingly Difficult Thing I've Ever Tried To Do And I Wish I Had A Better Idea Of How To Do It. In My Experience What You End Up With Is The By-product Of Your Failure To Achieve What You Set Out To Do. It May Turn Out Ok, But It Wasn't What You Meant And You've No Idea How You Got There.
Ideas
Advice
Wish
It's Reassuring To Realize That Everybody Is As Stupid As You Are And That All We Are Doing When We Are Standing In The Kitchen Wondering What We Came In Here For Is "woking.
Stupid
Kitchen
Wonder
Despite The Fact That An Indonesian Island Chicken Has Probably Had A Much More Natural Life Than One Raised On A Battery Farm In England, People Who Wouldn't Think Twice About Buying Something Oven-ready Become Much More Upset About A Chicken That They've Been On A Boat With, So There Is Probably Buried In The Western Psyche A Deep Taboo About Eating Anything You've Been Introduced To Socially.
Thinking
Islands
People
How Do I Know The Past Is Not A Fiction Conceived To Reconcile The Difference Between My State Of Mind And The Present.
Past
Differences
Mind
I Don't Believe It. Prove It To Me And I Still Won't Believe It.
Believe
Belief
Argument
Time Is An Illusion. Lunchtime Doubly So.
Time
Philosophy
Humorous
The Impossible Often Has A Kind Of Integrity To It Which The Merely Improbable Lacks. How Often Have You Been Presented With An Apparently Rational Explanation Of Something That Works In All Respects Other Than One, Which Is Just That It Is Hopelessly Improbable? Your Instinct Is To Say, 'yes, But He Or She Simply Wouldn't Do That.
Integrity
Impossible
Kind
There Is An Art To The Business Of Making Sandwiches Which It Is Given To Few Ever To Find The Time To Explore In Depth. It Is A Simple Task, But The Opportunities For Satisfaction Are Many And Profound.
Art
Opportunity
Simple
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.
Funny
Education
Humor
What Does It Matter? Science Has Achieved Some Wonderful Things, Of Course, But I'd Far Rather Be Happy Than Right Any Day.
Doe
Matter
Wonderful
I Always Thought Something Was Fundamentally Wrong With The Universe
Universe
Joo Janta 200 Super-chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses Have Been Specially Designed To Help People Develop A Relaxed Attitude To Danger. At The First Hint Of Trouble, They Turn Totally Black And Thus Prevent You From Seeing Anything That Might Alarm You.
Attitude
People
Black
Ah, This Is Obviously Some Strange Usage Of The Word 'safe' That I Wasn't Previously Aware Of.
Safe
Strange
Awareness
[the Head Of Radio Three] Had Been Ensnared By The Music Director Of The College And A Professor Of Philosophy. These Two Were Busy Explaining To The Harassed Man That The Phrase "too Much Mozart" Was, Given Any Reasonable Definition Of Those Three Words, An Inherently Self-contradictory Expression, And That Any Sentence Which Contained Such A Phrase Would Be Thereby Rendered Meaningless And Could Not, Consequently, Be Advanced As Part Of An Argument In Favour Of Any Given Programme-scheduling Strategy.
Philosophy
College
Men
Time, We Know, Is Relative. You Can Travel Light Years Through The Stars And Back, And If You Do It At The Speed Of Light Then, When You Return, You May Have Aged Mere Seconds While Your Twin Brother Or Sister Will Have Aged Twenty, Thirty, Forty Or However Many Years It Is, Depending On How Far You Traveled. This Will Come To You As A Profound Shock, Particularly If You Didn't Know You Had A Twin Brother Or Sister.
Sister
Time
Brother
I Find The Whole Business Of Religion Profoundly Interesting. But It Does Mystify Me That Otherwise Intelligent People Take It Seriously.
Atheist
Intelligent
People
Earth: Mostly Harmless
Earth
Life! Don't Talk To Me About Life!
Life
Hitchhiking
Talk To Me
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