Jacob Bronowski quotes - page 2

Almost everything that we do that is worth doing is done in the first place in the mind's eye. (Jacob Bronowski)
Science is not an impersonal construction. It is no less, and no more, personal than any other form of communicated thought. ...Science searches the common experience of people; and it is made by people, and it has their style. ...The style of Newton's work, as much as the content, dominated science for two centuries... The science of an age, like its art or its music, has style... But it has content and structure too, larger than the work of any one man... View quote
Jacob Bronowski
When a child... discovers his own imagination, he suddenly walks into a new life. ...seeing situations that do not exist. ...in part as fantasy, and in part as a quite rational exploration of future experiences. ...play ...frolics in the fantasy world, and it experiments in the rational world... They project themselves into all worlds, possible and impossible, and discover for themselves the knife-edge boundary between them. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
[T]he human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight... induction, which-like other forms of imagination-cannot be formalized. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
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. View quote
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. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or mesons. (Jacob Bronowski)
When a man counts one, two, three, he is not only doing mathematics, he is on the path to the mysticism of numbers in Pythagoras and Vitruvius and Kepler, to the Trinity and the signs of the Zodiac. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
Since the word "knowledge" occurs in my general title... I am going to be talking about epistemology, although I prefer to use the eighteenth-century, indeed, medieval phrase, "natural philosophy."... that enterprise of the human mind which attempts to trace lawfulness to nature, dead and living, but which is not directed to specific inquiries into how this or that law works. Philosophy in the sense in which I practice it, natural philosophy, is concerned with lawfulness rather than with laws and the general nature of laws rather than with the specific structure of this or that law. Natural philosophy was one of the three topics (moral philosophy and metaphysical philosophy were the others) to which one graduated in medieval universities after having studied the seven liberal arts. I believe that we need to review the whole of our natural philosophy in the light of scientific knowledge that has arisen in the last fifty years. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
In their broad Augustan day, Scottish miners were legally still serfs, just as miners in Greece had always been slaves; and neither civilization thought anything amiss. ...It was the engine, it was the horsepower which created consideration for the horse; and the Industrial Revolution which created our sensibility. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
In a parched African landscape like this at Omo, man first put his foot to the ground. That seems a pedestrian way to begin the ascent of man. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken, and when he can inject into the uncertainties of others the creative ideas which will strengthen them with purpose. At such a moment the man who can direct others, in thought or in action, can remake the world. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable. There is no absolute knowledge and those who claim it, whether they are scientist or dogmatist, open the door to tragedy. All knowledge, all information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The belief that science destroys culture is sometimes supported by historical statements that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected. This thesis is... directly contrary to history... [I]n the great age of Greece, art and science penetrate one another more closely than in any modern age. ...The example of these men in science as much as in art set the modern world afire in the Renaissance. And the type and symbol of Renaissance man... remains Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, mathematician, and engineer. No man has shown more strikingly the universality and the unity of the intellect. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experience, because he himself re-creates them. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. (Jacob Bronowski)
When a child begins to play games... he enters the gateway to reason and imagination together. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
I am using the word image in a wide meaning, which does not restrict it to the mind's eye as a visual organ. An image in my usage is what Charles Pierce called a sign... View quote
Jacob Bronowski
[S]ymbols have a reach and a roundness that goes beyond their literal and practical meaning. They are the rich concepts under which the mind gathers many particulars into one name, and many instances into one general induction. View quote
Jacob Bronowski
[A]ll our symbols have the same purpose; words are merely the symbols we use most commonly. The function of words in human thought is to stand for things which are not present to the senses, and allow the mind to manipulate them-things, concepts, ideas, everything that does not have a physical reality in front of us now. View quote
Jacob Bronowski