Jacob Bronowski Quotes
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Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
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It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
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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 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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Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
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All 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.
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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.
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The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
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To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
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p. 97-98: As quoted in: S.P. Sector (1997). A Study of Issues Relating to the Patentability of Biotechnological Subject Matter. Footnote 51.
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Human beings can imagine situations which are different from those in front of their eyes... because they make and hold in their minds images for absent things.
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All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying 'Halt!'
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The images play out for us events which are not present in our senses, and... create the future-a future that... may never come to exist in that form.
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I write... for laymen and scientists, because the reader who is interested in any activity which needs thought and judgement is... a person to whom science can be made to speak, It is not he who is deaf, but the specialists who have been dumb-the specialists in the arts as well as in the sciences.
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The most important images for human beings are simply words, which are abstract symbols. ...Evolution 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.
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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.
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Let me close by reminding you of what Newton actually did on the day that he conceived
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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...
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With the... symbolic memory we spell out the future-not one but many futures, which we weigh one against another.
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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.
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Symbols 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.