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.
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the thrilling potential of the unknown in life, suggesting that the challenges of uncertainty can also bring excitement and wonder.
In this quote, Bill Bryson highlights the dichotomy between frustration and excitement when faced with the vastness of the world's mysteries. Rather than perceiving the inability to understand or track everything as purely negative, he encourages a perspective that embraces the exhilarating possibilities of the unknown. This viewpoint inspires a curiosity about the world, celebrating its surprises and the adventures they may bring.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech to inspire students to embrace the unknowns in their academic journey.
More from Bill Bryson
All quotes →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.
Similar quotes
Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
This is the mystery of the riches of divine grace for sinners; for by a wonderful exchange our sins are now not ours but Christ's, and Christ's righteousness is not Christ's but ours.
If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way
I don't accept ideologies that are not a product of consensus. I don't have an ideology, but I do have a sense of what's right and what's wrong.
Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, have yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltiness of time.
Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.