Top 91 Jacob Bronowski Quotes
#1. A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.
Jacob Bronowski
#2. There is one gift above all others that makes man unique among the animals, and it is the gift displayed everywhere here: his immense pleasure in exercising and pushing forward his own skill.
Jacob Bronowski
#3. The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.
Jacob Bronowski
#5. Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
Jacob Bronowski
#6. Freedom is valued in a culture that wants to encourage dissent and to stimulate originality and independence. It belongs to a society which is open to change, and which esteems the agent of change, the individual, above its own peace of mind.
Jacob Bronowski
#7. The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.
Jacob Bronowski
#9. We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny
Jacob Bronowski
#11. The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.
Jacob Bronowski
#12. Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.
Jacob Bronowski
#13. Mass, time , magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
Jacob Bronowski
#14. There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance.
Jacob Bronowski
#16. Sex was invented as a biological instrument by (say) the green algae. But as an instrument in the ascent of man which is basic to his cultural evolution, it was invented by man himself.
Jacob Bronowski
#17. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
Jacob Bronowski
#18. It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.
Jacob Bronowski
#19. The paradox of knowledge is not confined to the small, atomic scale; on the contrary, it is as cogent on the scale of man, and even of the stars.
Jacob Bronowski
#20. Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.
Jacob Bronowski
#21. Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.
Jacob Bronowski
#22. Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind.
Jacob Bronowski
#23. The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
Jacob Bronowski
#24. It's a sort of curious phenomenon that God is somehow not quite as nice as the devil; the devil doesn't punish you for behaving well, but God punishes you for behaving badly.
Jacob Bronowski
#25. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
Jacob Bronowski
#26. The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.
Jacob Bronowski
#27. The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
Jacob Bronowski
#28. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.
Jacob Bronowski
#29. The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.
Jacob Bronowski
#30. A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.
Jacob Bronowski
#31. Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Jacob Bronowski
#33. That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution
not biological, but cultural evolution ... The Ascent of Man.
Jacob Bronowski
#35. Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.
Jacob Bronowski
#37. One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
Jacob Bronowski
#38. Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.
Jacob Bronowski
#39. The poem and the drama is not the experience except as we identify ourselves with it, and know what it feels like to have it. What distinguishes literature is that it cannot be understood unless we understand what it is like to be human.
Jacob Bronowski
#40. The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
Jacob Bronowski
#41. And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.
Jacob Bronowski
#42. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
Jacob Bronowski
#43. The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow , and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind , A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living , coiled, the spring .
Jacob Bronowski
#44. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
Jacob Bronowski
#45. It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual
Jacob Bronowski
#46. The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived - Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
Jacob Bronowski
#47. The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry
Jacob Bronowski
#48. Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.
Jacob Bronowski
#49. I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
Jacob Bronowski
#50. We must always remember that the real content of evolution (biological as well as cultural) is the elaboration of new behaviour.
Jacob Bronowski
#51. In trying to formalize a rule, we look for truth, but what we find is knowledge, and what we fail to find is certainty. This limitation has no special bearing on the knowledge of self.
Jacob Bronowski
#52. Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.
Jacob Bronowski
#53. The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
Jacob Bronowski
#54. The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.
Jacob Bronowski
#55. The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.
Jacob Bronowski
#56. There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.
Jacob Bronowski
#57. It is very much easier to divide your outlook on the world into two halves, to say that you know this belongs to the daily half and this belongs to the Sunday half.
Jacob Bronowski
#58. Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.
Jacob Bronowski
#59. Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.
Jacob Bronowski
#60. Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime. Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values
Jacob Bronowski
#61. To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.
Jacob Bronowski
#62. When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton ... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.
Jacob Bronowski
#63. One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.
Jacob Bronowski
#64. Who has not hoped
To outrage an enemy's dignity?
Who has not been swept
By the wish to hurt?
And who has not thought that the impersonal world
Deserves no better than to be destroyed
By one fabulous sign of his displeasure?
Jacob Bronowski
#65. Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?
Jacob Bronowski
#66. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.
Jacob Bronowski
#67. We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.
Jacob Bronowski
#68. But we are in any case mistaken if we think of our picture of the world as a passive record. The picture is made by, it is made of, our activity, all the way from the logic of the brain to the use of the plow and the wheel.
Jacob Bronowski
#70. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.
Jacob Bronowski
#71. The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of man.
Jacob Bronowski
#72. No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
Jacob Bronowski
#74. The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.
Jacob Bronowski
#75. The richness of human life is that we have many lives; we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do; and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousand lives.
Jacob Bronowski
#76. It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Jacob Bronowski
#77. We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny.
Jacob Bronowski
#78. There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.
Jacob Bronowski
#79. We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
Jacob Bronowski
#80. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
Jacob Bronowski
#81. Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. ... No one can be a scientist ... if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.
Jacob Bronowski
#82. The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists was science itself.
Jacob Bronowski
#83. The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.
Jacob Bronowski
#84. All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.
Jacob Bronowski
#85. The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well. And having done it well, he loves to do it better.
Jacob Bronowski
#86. The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.
Jacob Bronowski
#87. You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.
Jacob Bronowski
#88. We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
Jacob Bronowski
#89. Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.
Jacob Bronowski
#90. The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.
Jacob Bronowski
#91. Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
Jacob Bronowski
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