Jacob Bronowski - The ascent of man (1973)

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

Jacob Bronowski
The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.

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
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
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. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.

Jacob Bronowski
In a parched African landscape like this at Omo, man first put his foot to the ground. That seems a pedestrian way to begin the ascent of man.

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
Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

Jacob Bronowski
And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into—into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.

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
Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

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
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
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
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