Jacob Bronowski Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Physics is not events but observations. Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations.

Jacob Bronowski
Those who personally dominate are heroes for the hour; those who build are immortal.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

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
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 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
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
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.

Jacob Bronowski
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
Truth in science is like Everest, an ordering of the facts.

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
Like the voyages of the Spaniards into the fabulous West, Science even at its boldest does the will of history, and in turn helps to determine its movement.

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

Jacob Bronowski
The values of science derive neither from the virtues of its members, nor from the finger-wagging codes of conduct by which every profession reminds itself to be good. They have grown out of the practice of science, because they are the inescapable conditions for its practice.

Jacob Bronowski