Jacob Bronowski was an English scientist, mathematician, historian of science, poet and inventor. He is best known for his work on the BBC series The Ascent of Man, which traced the development of human society through its understanding of science. He was also the author of The Identity of Man, a book that explored the relationship between science and the humanities. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jacob Bronowski on education, life, science.
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.
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.
Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
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.
Power is the by-product of understanding.
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.
Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Progress is the exploration of our own error.
It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual
Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
Certainty ends inquiry.
The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists was science itself.
The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.
Jacob Bronowski Quotes About Life
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
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority . . . — Jacob Bronowski
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
Jacob Bronowski Quotes About Science
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
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
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
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
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
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. — Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski Quotes About World
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
We have to understand the world can only be grasped by action, not by comtemplation. The hand is more important than the eye....The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. — Jacob Bronowski
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
Jacob Bronowski Quotes About Science And Art
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 marvelous plasticity of mind. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. — Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski Quotes About Mind
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
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
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
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
Jacob Bronowski Quotes About Nature
Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding — Jacob Bronowski
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws. — Jacob Bronowski
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
Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment. — Jacob Bronowski
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
Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door. — Jacob Bronowski
I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind. — Jacob Bronowski
Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created. — Jacob Bronowski
To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
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
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
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art. — Jacob Bronowski
We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat. — Jacob Bronowski
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
I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man. — Jacob Bronowski
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder. — Jacob Bronowski
Who has not hopedTo outrage an enemy's dignity?Who has not been sweptBy the wish to hurt?And who has not thought that the impersonal worldDeserves no better than to be destroyedBy one fabulous sign of his displeasure? — Jacob Bronowski
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
Revolutions are not made by fate but by men. — Jacob Bronowski
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. ... The time has come to consider how we might bring about a separation, as complete as possible, between Science and Government in all countries. I call this the disestablishment of science, in the same sense in which the churches have been disestablished and have become independent of the state. — Jacob Bronowski
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
There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts. — Jacob Bronowski
The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge. — Jacob Bronowski
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike. — Jacob Bronowski
Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts. — Jacob Bronowski
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
Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety. — Jacob Bronowski
The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does. — Jacob Bronowski
All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
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
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
The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity. — Jacob Bronowski
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science. — Jacob Bronowski
A genius is a man who has two great ideas. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture. — Jacob Bronowski
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
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. — Jacob Bronowski
Many theories of the ancient world seem terribly childish today, a hodge-podge of fables and false comparisons.But our theories will seem childish five-hundred years from now.Every theory is based on some analogy, and sooner or later the theory fails because the analogy turns out to be false. A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. — Jacob Bronowski
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
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
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
Life Lessons by Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski taught us to never be afraid to ask questions and explore the unknown, as knowledge is power.
He also showed us that understanding the world around us requires both science and art, and that the two are inextricably linked.
Lastly, Bronowski taught us to never give up in the face of adversity and to always strive to make the world a better place.
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