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 BrysonRead
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the excitement of discovering new perspectives in familiar surroundings.
Bill Bryson's quote emphasizes the joy and thrill of encountering familiar settings from a fresh viewpoint. It suggests that even in the most well-known environments, there are always new angles and ways to perceive the world around us, encouraging exploration and openness to change.
In practice
During a travel writing workshop, to inspire participants to look at their hometowns differently.
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.
For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
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.
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose
Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
The Great Spirit will not make me suffer because I am ignorant. He will put me in a place where I shall be better off than in this world.
Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition.
All of the violence that doesn't occur doesn't get reported on the news.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Who can sleep on the night that God became man?
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