Jacob Bronowski Quotes

Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.

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.

The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.

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.

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.

The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.

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.

The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.

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.

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.

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.

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.

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.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures.

In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.

The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.

Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.

The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.

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.

I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.

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.

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.

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.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny

Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.