Jacob Bronowski Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

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

Jacob Bronowski
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.

Jacob Bronowski
The symbol of the University is the iron statue outside the Rathskeller of a barefoot goose girl that every student kisses at graduation. The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. 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
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

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
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. That is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature.

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 a shaper of the landscape. In body and in mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent.

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

Jacob Bronowski
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.

Jacob Bronowski
Stones make a wall, walls make a house, houses make streets, and streets make a city. A city is stones and a city is people; but it is not a heap of stones, and it is not a just a jostle of people.

Jacob Bronowski
There are two experiences on which our visual world is based: that gravity is vertical, and that the horizontal stands at right angles to it.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them.

Jacob Bronowski
A fact is discovered, a theory is invented; is any theory ever deep enough for it to be truly called a creation? Most scientists would answer: no! Science, they would say, engages only part of the mind - the rational intellect - but creation must engage the whole mind. Science demands none of that ground swell of emotion, none of the rich bottom of personality, which fills out the work of art...

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
It is not obviously silly to classify flowers by their colors; after all, the bluer flowers do tend to be associated with the colder climates and greater heights. There is nothing wrong with the system in advance. It simply does not work as conveniently and as instructively as Linnaeus's classification by family likenesses.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is a great many things... but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think. It need more courage than we have ever found when we have faced our worldly problems.

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
Discovery is a double relation of analysis and synthesis together. As an analysis, it probes for what is there; but then, as a synthesis, it puts the parts together in a form by which the creative mind transcends the bare limits, the bare skeleton, that nature provides.

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
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
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