Jacob Bronowski famous quotes

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

#Errors #Judgment #Form

Certainty ends inquiry.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Learning #Inquiry #Ends

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Creativity #Adventure #Knowledge

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

#Men #Thinking #Air

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

#Liberty #Conformity #Lifetime

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

#Inspirational #Education #Teacher

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

#Believe #Ignorance #Reality

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists was science itself.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Science #Discovery #Scientist

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

#Art #Science #Thinking

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Inspirational #Cutting #Hands

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

#Thinking #Shadow #Our Actions

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

#Doors #Tragedy #Scientist

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Art #Creation #Art Is

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

#Animal #Unique #Men

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

#Eye #Cutting #Hands

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#World #Action #Contemplation

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.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Art #Men #Unique

In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Appreciation #Saws #Moments

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Mean #Intelligent #Knowing

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

#Order #Ideas #Creative

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

#Giving #Achievement #Unattainable

We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Law #Understanding #Gains

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

#Men #Animal #Years

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

#War #Men #Animal

A genius is a man who has two great ideas.
-- Jacob Bronowski

#Men #Ideas #Two

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

#Independence #Mind #Doe

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

#Trying #Prejudice #Cost

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

#Men #Age #Different

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

#Justice #Social Justice #Reader

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

#Giving #Violence #Want