Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2024 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. “Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

Featured in: Momentum Quotes

8. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

12. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

14. “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

15. “99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.”

— Bill Bryson

16. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

18. “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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

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

— Bill Bryson

20. “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

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. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Bill Bryson

25. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

27. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Bill Bryson

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

40. “Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.”

— Bill Bryson

41. “Traveling is more fun – hell, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.”

— Bill Bryson

Featured in: Fun Quotes

42. “As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn’t go quite so far around it as others.”

— Bill Bryson

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

— Bill Bryson

44. “The process became known as sea-floor spreading. When the crust reached the end of its journey at the boundary with continents, it plunged back into the Earth in a process known as subduction.”

— Bill Bryson

45. “There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.”

— Bill Bryson

46. “We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.”

— Bill Bryson

47. “The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.”

— Bill Bryson

48. “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

49. “To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.”

— Bill Bryson

50. “The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.”

— Bill Bryson