Jacob Bronowski Quotes
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.
Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.
We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye ... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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.
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.
Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.
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.
Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
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.
To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
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.
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape.
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.
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.
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.
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
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.
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.
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.
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.
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.
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.
The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.
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.
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?
The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
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.
The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.