Jacob Bronowski Quotes

101 quotes in 1445 categories

• The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.
• To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
• 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…
• 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…
• No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power. ... The time has come to consider how we might bring…
• [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…
• We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye ...…
• We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
• But nature - that is, biological evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, ... he has a rather crude…
• 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…
• 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…
• When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than…
• A genius is a man who has two great ideas.
• The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists was science itself.
• 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…
• The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.
• 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…
• Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which…
• 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…
• 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:…

Browse Jacob Bronowski Quotes by Category