Jacob Bronowski quotes

Jacob Bronowski was a Polish-British mathematician, historian of science, and author, celebrated for making science accessible to the public. His television series "The Ascent of Man" inspired generations to appreciate the human side of scientific achievement. He is remembered for championing the connection between science, creativity, and the values of human dignity. Here are 99 of his quotes:

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)
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
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. View quote
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... View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Dissent is the mark of freedom. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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)
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
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. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Ralegh's own circle, which turned Christopher Marlowe into a rationalist, was dominated by... Thomas Hariot. For navigation is dependent on astronomy; it went hand in hand with the new speculations about the world and the solar system... in turn, the voyages of the great navigators inspired the literature of Elizabethan England. The worlds of art and science and the physical world unfolded then together. It was not by accident that the first table of logarithms was published within a few years of the First Folio. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The ability... to experiment with imaginary situations, gives man a freedom... the pleasure in trying out and exploring imaginary situations. A child's play is concerned with this pleasure; and so is much of art, and much of science... [P]ure science... is a form of play, in this sense. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
[T]he most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols. ...[E]volution has greatly enlarged the front lobes of the human brain, which govern the sense of the past and the future; and... they are probably the seat of our other images. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Of course it's tempting to close one's eyes to history, and instead speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft. And that form of theft began 10,000 years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. The evidence for that, we saw, in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower... That is the beginning of war. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literal meaning of its name: knowledge. The notion of the specialized mind is... as modern as the specialized man, 'the scientist', a word which is only a hundred years old. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
There is today almost no scientific theory which was held when, say, the Industrial Revolution began about 1760. Most often today's theories flatly contradict those of 1760; many contradict those of 1900. In cosmology, in quantum mechanics, in genetics, in the social sciences, who now holds the beliefs that seemed firm sixty years ago? Yet the society of scientists has survived these changes without a revolution, and honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares. No one has recanted abjectly at a trial before his colleagues. The whole structure of science has been changed and no one has been either disgraced or deposed. Through all the changes of science, the society of scientists is flexible and single-minded together, and evolves and rights itself. In the language of science, it is a stable society. (Jacob Bronowski)
What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. ...the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The language of ideas creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in the English dictionary. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
[I]magination... is the faculty... the common root from which science and literature... spring and grow and flourish together. ...the great ages of science are the great ages of all the arts... [P]owerful minds have taken fire from one another... without asking... to tie their imagination to falling balls or a haunted island. ...When Galileo was looking through his telescope at the moon, Shakespeare was writing The Tempest and all Europe was in ferment, from Johannes Kepler to Peter Paul Rubens, and from the first table of logarithms by John Napier to the Authorized version of the Bible. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Science and the arts shared the same language at the Restoration. They no longer seem to do so today. ...they lack the same language. And it is the business of each of us to make that one universal language which alone can unite art and science, and layman and scientist, in a common understanding. View quote
Jacob Bronowski