Jacob Bronowski Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

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

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
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
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
Every human action goes back in some part to our animal origins; we should be cold and lonely creatures if we were cut off from that blood-stream of life.

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
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
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
I find both a special pleasure and constraint in describing the progress of mathematics, because it has been part of so much speculation: a ladder for mystical as well as rational thought in the intellectual ascent of man.

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
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
A new conception was being made... that whatever fundamental units the world is put together from, they are more delicate, more fugitive, more startling than we catch in the Butterfly Net of our senses.

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
Science is the creation of concepts and their exploration in the facts. It has no other test of the concept than its empirical truth to fact.

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
The pre-eminence of astronomy rests on the peculiarity that it can be treated mathematically; and the progress of physics, and most recently biology, has hinged equally on finding formulations of their laws that can be displayed as mathematical models.

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

Jacob Bronowski
Knowledge makes prodigious journeys, and what seems to us a leap in time often turns out t be a long progression from place to place, from one city to another.

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 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