Jacob Bronowski Quotes
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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.
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Certainty ends inquiry.
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The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
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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.
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Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
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Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
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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.
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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 is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.
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Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
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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 . . .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.
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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.
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Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
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Progress is the exploration of our own error.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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Power is the by-product of understanding.
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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. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.
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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.
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