Jacob Bronowski Quotes & Sayings

Mass, time , magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's. — Jacob Bronowski

The Principle of Uncertainty fixed once for all the realisation that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty. — 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. — Jacob Bronowski

It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy. — Jacob Bronowski

All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. — 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

I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man. — Jacob Bronowski

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

Dissent is the mark of freedom. — 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

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

[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature - a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules - out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer. — Jacob Bronowski

The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself. — Jacob Bronowski

The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way. — Jacob Bronowski

We must always remember that the real content of evolution (biological as well as cultural) is the elaboration of new behaviour. — Jacob Bronowski

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime. Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values — Jacob Bronowski

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

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men. — Jacob Bronowski

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts
obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts. — Jacob Bronowski

We receive experience from nature in a series of messages. From these messages we extract a content of information: that is, we decode the messages in some way. And from this code of information we then make a basic vocabulary of concepts and a basic grammar of laws, which jointly describe the inner organization that nature translates into the happenings and the appearances we meet. — Jacob Bronowski

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. — Jacob Bronowski

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of man. — Jacob Bronowski

The poem and the drama is not the experience except as we identify ourselves with it, and know what it feels like to have it. What distinguishes literature is that it cannot be understood unless we understand what it is like to be human. — 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

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before. — Jacob Bronowski

Yet, the principle of uncertainty is a bad name. In science or outside of it, we are not uncertain. Our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance. We should call it the principle of tolerance. First in the engineering sense. Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge, all information, between human beings, can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance, and that's whether it's in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of though that aspires to dogma. — Jacob Bronowski

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike. — 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

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 central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge. — Jacob Bronowski

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding — 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

We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny. — Jacob Bronowski

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

Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment. — Jacob Bronowski

We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny — 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

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

The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture. — Jacob Bronowski

Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. — 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

It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual — Jacob Bronowski

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations-more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art. — Jacob Bronowski

Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts. — Jacob Bronowski

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

We are not bound by commandments but by loyalties, and we have more loyalties than can be covered by fiat. We have to weigh their conflicting values for ourselves, on this occasion and on that, once in this favor and once in that, in the natural day to day of our conduct. In a complex and many-sided culture, we have to develop our ethic in our own actions, now within one group and now within another. Perhaps this group or that may have a book of rules for its members, but there can be no book to balance for any one of us, once for all, the loyalties that bind him to a dozen groups. — 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

It is very much easier to divide your outlook on the world into two halves, to say that you know this belongs to the daily half and this belongs to the Sunday half. — Jacob Bronowski

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

Many theories of the ancient world seem terribly childish today, a hodge-podge of fables and false comparisons.But our theories will seem childish five-hundred years from now.Every theory is based on some analogy, and sooner or later the theory fails because the analogy turns out to be false. A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day. — Jacob Bronowski

And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man. — Jacob Bronowski

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

The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show. — Jacob Bronowski

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

Freedom is valued in a culture that wants to encourage dissent and to stimulate originality and independence. It belongs to a society which is open to change, and which esteems the agent of change, the individual, above its own peace of mind. — Jacob Bronowski

Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture. — Jacob Bronowski

In trying to formalize a rule, we look for truth, but what we find is knowledge, and what we fail to find is certainty. This limitation has no special bearing on the knowledge of self. — Jacob Bronowski

Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind. — Jacob Bronowski

The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton's thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the 'discovery' of the laws of gravity. — Jacob Bronowski

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

Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist. — Jacob Bronowski

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned. — Jacob Bronowski

Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. — Jacob Bronowski

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

I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together. — 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

There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so. — Jacob Bronowski

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

Who has not hoped
To outrage an enemy's dignity?
Who has not been swept
By the wish to hurt?
And who has not thought that the impersonal world
Deserves no better than to be destroyed
By one fabulous sign of his displeasure? — 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

Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all. — 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

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

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

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

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

One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought. — Jacob Bronowski

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

The richness of human life is that we have many lives; we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do; and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousand lives. — 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

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think. — Jacob Bronowski

But nature - that is, biological evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, ... he has a rather crude survival kit; and yet -this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments. 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

There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the centre of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognise ourselves in the past on the steps to the present. All over these caves the print of the hand says: 'This is my mark. This is man. — 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

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

You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life. — Jacob Bronowski

All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find. — Jacob Bronowski

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

It's a sort of curious phenomenon that God is somehow not quite as nice as the devil; the devil doesn't punish you for behaving well, but God punishes you for behaving badly. — 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

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 great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them. — Jacob Bronowski

There is one gift above all others that makes man unique among the animals, and it is the gift displayed everywhere here: his immense pleasure in exercising and pushing forward his own skill. — Jacob Bronowski

The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow , and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind , A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living , coiled, the spring . — Jacob Bronowski

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created. — Jacob Bronowski

Certainty ends inquiry. — Jacob Bronowski

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