Top 500 Bill Bryson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,” he says, “is that we are not the culmination of anything.”

— Bill Bryson

452. “It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.”

— Bill Bryson

453. “If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.”

— Bill Bryson

454. “She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.”

— Bill Bryson

455. “By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’.”

— Bill Bryson

456. “Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.”

— Bill Bryson

457. “Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt30 was made in 1650, when 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 that has amused historians and textbook writers ever since.”

— Bill Bryson

458. “It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn’t actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.”

— Bill Bryson

459. “Thank you,” I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn’t do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I.”

— Bill Bryson

460. “I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.”

— Bill Bryson

461. “Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.”

— Bill Bryson

462. “England?” she said with unreserved amazement. “Why do you live in England?” “Because it is nothing like Indianapolis.”

— Bill Bryson

463. “It’s a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces.”

— Bill Bryson

464. “Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having a guest in your house without a permit from the local bailiff.”

— Bill Bryson

465. “In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt. He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them. In.”

— Bill Bryson

466. “Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, in 1969 food scientists from all over the world convened at ‘An Origin of Corn Conference’ at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times personal, that the conference broke up in confusion, and no papers from it were ever published.”

— Bill Bryson

467. “Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.”

— Bill Bryson

468. “The richer the country, the more allergies its citizens get.”

— Bill Bryson

469. “Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306, 662, 400 years to complete.”

— Bill Bryson

470. “The ill-fated dodo. Slow, flightless and dangerously trusting, the dodo was driven to extinction just seventy years after first being spotted by European sailors on its island home of Mauritius.”

— Bill Bryson

471. “The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.”

— Bill Bryson

472. “The friendliness of Australians – all of it quite sincere and spontaneous, as far as I could ever tell – never ceases to amaze or gratify.”

— Bill Bryson

473. “I have been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.”

— Bill Bryson

474. “In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.”

— Bill Bryson

475. “There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.”

— Bill Bryson

476. “Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.”

— Bill Bryson

477. “In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.”

— Bill Bryson

478. “These are all just informed guesses.”

— Bill Bryson

479. “Altogether, 80 percent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit, but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don’t is not at all clear.”

— Bill Bryson

480. “Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us – evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.”

— Bill Bryson

481. “The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggie bag. ‘No thank you,’ I said through a thin smile, ‘I don’t believe I could find a dog that would eat it.”

— Bill Bryson

482. “I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it.”

— Bill Bryson

483. “Owen. He coined the term Dinosauria in 1841. It means ‘terrible lizard’ and was a curiously inapt name.”

— Bill Bryson

484. “You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It’s just a fact of life.”

— Bill Bryson

485. “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.”

— Bill Bryson

486. “And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.”

— Bill Bryson

487. “On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives.”

— Bill Bryson

488. “There is a certain irony in the fact that Britain gave the world nearly all its most important geological names – Devonian, Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician – but that the one epoch that everybody knows about is named for the Jura Mountains in France, even though the Dorset coast is actually the best place in the world to see Jurassic outcrops.”

— Bill Bryson

489. “For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.”

— Bill Bryson

490. “Americans alive today each have about 625 times more lead in their blood than people did a century ago.”

— Bill Bryson

491. “Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.”

— Bill Bryson

492. “Incidentally, the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains is a myth. No one knows where the idea came from, but it has never been true or close to true. You may not use it all terribly sensibly, but you employ all your brain in one way or another.”

— Bill Bryson

493. “We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us.”

— Bill Bryson

494. “Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets, the poorer it thinks itself. All.”

— Bill Bryson

495. “The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.”

— Bill Bryson

496. “Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.”

— Bill Bryson

497. “Altogether about 80 percent of the processed foods we eat contain added sugars. Heinz ketchup is almost one-quarter sugar. It has more sugar per unit of volume than Coca-Cola.”

— Bill Bryson

498. “You have three chromosomes, Bryson. X, Y, and Fuckhead.” – Katz.”

— Bill Bryson

499. “Well, you blink fourteen thousand times a day – so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day.”

— Bill Bryson

500. “When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer’s day, it’s really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.”

— Bill Bryson