Jacob Bronowski Quotes - Page 3

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• 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

  Beauty, Art, Discovery

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• But nature - that is, biological evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, ... he has a rather crude survival kit; and yet -this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments. Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Men, Emotional, Animal

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• The problem of values arises only when men try to fit together their need to be social animals with their need to be free men. There is no problem, and there are no values, until men want to do both. If an anarchist wants only freedom, whatever the cost, he will prefer the jungle of man at war with man. And if a tyrant wants only social order, he will create the totalitarian state.

  Jacob Bronowski

  War, Animal, Men

  Jacob Bronowski (1975). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual

  Jacob Bronowski

  Mistake, Thinking, Creative

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• Power is the by-product of understanding.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Power, Understanding, Products

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• 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...

  Jacob Bronowski

  Events, Pay, Life Is

  "The Reach of Imagination". Book by Jacob Bronowski, 1967.

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• Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Men, Doors, Satire

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

  9 Copy quote

• Progress is the exploration of our own error.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Errors, Progress, Exploration

  Jacob Bronowski (2008). “The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination”, p.84, Yale University Press

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• Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Art, Creation, Art Is

  Jacob Bronowski (1975). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Da Vinci was as great a mechanic and inventor as were Newton and his friends. Yet a glance at his notebooks shows us that what fascinated him about nature was its variety, its infinite adaptability, the fitness and the individuality of all its parts. By contrast what made astronomy a pleasure to Newton was its unity, its singleness, its model of a nature in which the diversified parts were mere disguises for the same blank atoms.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Notebook, Nature, Science

  Jacob Bronowski (2011). “The Common Sense of Science”, p.16, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Book, School, Science

  "'The Ascent of Man' ('The Long Childhood')". Documentary TV Mini-Series, Episode 13, 1973.

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• 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

  Art, Work, Different

  Jacob Bronowski (2011). “Science and Human Values”, p.57, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Science, Two, Experience

  "World Authors 1950 - 1970". Book by John Wakeman, 1975.

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• 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

  Dream, Real, Simple

  Jacob Bronowski (1975). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• 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

  Science, Giving, Achievement

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

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• 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

  Mean, Light, Illumination

  Jacob Bronowski (1975). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Simple, Ideas

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

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• 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

  Independence, Mind, Doe

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• 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

  Men, Self, Way

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Animal, Unique, Men

  1979 In The Listener.

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• 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

  Science, Men, Race

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• 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

  Thinking, Shadow, Our Actions

  Jacob Bronowski (1978). “The Common Sense of Science”, p.120, Harvard University Press

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• 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

  Sunday, Two, Perspective

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• 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

  Mean, Science, Purpose

  Jacob Bronowski (2011). “The Common Sense of Science”, p.16, Faber & Faber

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

  Jacob Bronowski

  Metaphor, Symbols

  "Science and human values". Book by Jacob Bronowski, 1975.

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