803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements – nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore – and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.

Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different – often very different – ways of shaping particular letters.

This bewildered but well-meaning gentleman opposed his daughter’s marriage to Captain Nungesser on the grounds – not unreasonable on the face of it – that Nungesser was destitute, broken-bodied, something of a bounder, unemployable except in time of war, and French.

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, “We all do.

In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

Baron Rothschild, whose obsessive quest for rare species led to the annihilation of several.

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

Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia’s wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.