Jacob Bronowski Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
-
The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.
-
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.
-
Power is the by-product of understanding.
-
The wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.
-
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.
-
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
-
The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
-
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
-
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
-
Almost everything that we do that is worth doing is done in the first place in the mind's eye.
-
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.
-
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
-
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
-
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.
-
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
-
The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
-
The 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When a child begins to play games... he enters the gateway to reason and imagination together.