Jacob Bronowski Quotes

1. “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.”

— Jacob Bronowski

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2. “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

3. “Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.”

— Jacob Bronowski

4. “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

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

— Jacob Bronowski

6. “Dissent is the mark of freedom.”

— Jacob Bronowski

7. “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.”

— Jacob Bronowski

8. “Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.”

— Jacob Bronowski

9. “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

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

— Jacob Bronowski

11. “Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.”

— Jacob Bronowski

12. “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

13. “The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.”

— Jacob Bronowski

14. “There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.”

— Jacob Bronowski

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual.”

— Jacob Bronowski

21. “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

22. “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.”

— Jacob Bronowski

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

— Jacob Bronowski

24. “Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.”

— Jacob Bronowski

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “A genius is a man who has two great ideas.”

— Jacob Bronowski

30. “Certainty ends inquiry.”

— Jacob Bronowski

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

— Jacob Bronowski

32. “Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.”

— Jacob Bronowski

33. “We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.”

— Jacob Bronowski

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.”

— Jacob Bronowski

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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.”

— Jacob Bronowski

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

— Jacob Bronowski

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

— Jacob Bronowski

45. “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

46. “Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.”

— Jacob Bronowski

47. “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

48. “To me, being an intellectual doesn’t mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.”

— Jacob Bronowski

49. “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

50. “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