Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”

— Bill Bryson

2. “More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.”

— Bill Bryson

3. “You don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.”

— Bill Bryson

4. “Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.”

— Bill Bryson

5. “There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.”

— Bill Bryson

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6. “English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.”

— Bill Bryson

7. “Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.”

— Bill Bryson

8. “The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.”

— Bill Bryson

9. “I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”

— Bill Bryson

Featured in: Country Quotes

10. “I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.”

— Bill Bryson

11. “There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.”

— Bill Bryson

12. “Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.”

— Bill Bryson

13. “99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.”

— Bill Bryson

14. “A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.”

— Bill Bryson

15. “Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.”

— Bill Bryson

16. “I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.”

— Bill Bryson

17. “The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population.”

— Bill Bryson

18. “Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.”

— Bill Bryson

19. “I can’t fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way.”

— Bill Bryson

20. “Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.”

— Bill Bryson

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21. “There are things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.”

— Bill Bryson

22. “Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do.”

— Bill Bryson

23. “In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren’t available.”

— Bill Bryson

24. “It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.”

— Bill Bryson

25. “I can’t imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.”

— Bill Bryson

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26. “We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”

— Bill Bryson

27. “There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.”

— Bill Bryson

28. “Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.”

— Bill Bryson

29. “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.”

— Bill Bryson

30. “I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.”

— Bill Bryson

31. “Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.”

— Bill Bryson

32. “I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.”

— Bill Bryson

33. “It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.”

— Bill Bryson

34. “The human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats.”

— Bill Bryson

35. “Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.”

— Bill Bryson

36. “Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.”

— Bill Bryson

37. “Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.”

— Bill Bryson

38. “The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.”

— Bill Bryson

39. “I was heading to Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to say too often if you can possibly help it.”

— Bill Bryson

40. “The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.”

— Bill Bryson

41. “There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.”

— Bill Bryson

42. “Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most – 99.99 percent – are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”

— Bill Bryson

43. “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.”

— Bill Bryson

44. “1905. In that year, Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the same year he was turned down for two teaching jobs.”

— Bill Bryson

45. “There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans.”

— Bill Bryson

46. “Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion.”

— Bill Bryson

47. “Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.”

— Bill Bryson

48. “Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.”

— Bill Bryson

49. “Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive.”

— Bill Bryson

50. “It wasn’t until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.”

— Bill Bryson