If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; ‘life’, something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that’s the only explanation we had.

Douglas Adams (1952-2001) English author, humourist, screenwriter

Speech, Digital Biota 2 Conference, Cambridge, UK (Sep 1998)
    (Source)

Quoted by Richard Dawkins in his eulogy for Adams (17 Sep 2001)