Jacob Bronowski Quotes
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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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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.
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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...
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The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the 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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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.
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Interest, say in mathematics, has usually been killed by routine teaching, exactly as the literary interest... has been killed...
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To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements.
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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.
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Imagination is the manipulation of images in one's head... the rational manipulation... as well as the literary and artistic manipulation.
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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.
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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... Pure science... is a form of play, in this sense.
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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.
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Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
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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.
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Dissent is the mark of freedom.
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The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality-physical and emotional.
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The invention of photography has made the painter and the patron lose interest in the likeness and transfer it to some more formal pattern. Our whole sensibility has been re-created by such subtle shifts.
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There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.
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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.