Life & Wisdom Quote by Celia Green

Research, in Celia Green's formulation, starts where your confidence breaks. "Attack the facts" is a deliberately martial verb choice: not collect, not curate, not "explore", but strike. It casts inquiry as an adversarial encounter with reality, a refusal to be soothed by familiar explanations or the comforting inertia of consensus. The phrase "point of greatest astonishment" is the real lever. Green isn't praising novelty for its own sake; she's locating the stress fractures in our models of the world - the datapoints that feel wrong, excessive, or embarrassingly hard to reconcile.

The intent is methodological but also psychological. Astonishment is both a signal and a vulnerability: it's the moment you realize your categories are inadequate. Most people respond by smoothing it over - rationalizing, changing the subject, treating the anomaly as noise. Green's subtext is that progress depends on the opposite impulse: to treat surprise as an instrument, to press on it until it yields a new framework or exposes a hidden assumption. "Attack" implies persistence and a willingness to risk being incorrect in public, which is often the real barrier to investigation.

Context matters because Green has long been interested in the edges of orthodox thought - perception, consciousness, experiences that institutional science has historically dismissed as "weird". Read that way, the line becomes a critique of research cultures that reward safe incrementalism. She suggests a bolder ethic: don't start where the literature is thickest; start where the world still doesn't behave.