Jacob Bronowski

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

— Jacob Bronowski

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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

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.

— Jacob Bronowski

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.

— Jacob Bronowski

[I]nterest, say in mathematics, has usually been killed by routine teaching, exactly as the literary interest... has been killed...

— 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.

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

[T]he 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.

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

Newton was born during Cromell's revolution in the troubled 1640s; he was eighteen at the Restoration in 1660; and he published the Principia during the intrigues which ended by bringing William of Orange to England in the revolution of 1688. These are the moments when the powerful or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken...

— 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...

— Jacob Bronowski

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.

— Jacob Bronowski

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.

— 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.

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

— Jacob Bronowski

No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field — a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. … We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.

— Jacob Bronowski

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.

— Jacob Bronowski

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

— Jacob Bronowski

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.

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

Dissent is the mark of freedom.

— Jacob Bronowski

Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We do not call their achievements creations because they are not personal enough. The West Indies were there all the time; and as for the telephone, we feel that Bell's ingenious thought was somehow not fundamental. The groundwork was there, and if not Bell then someone else would have stumbled on the telephone almost as accidently as on the West Indies.

— Jacob Bronowski

A fact is discovered, a theory is invented; is any theory ever deep enough for it to be truly called a creation? Most scientists would answer: no! Science, they would say, engages only part of the mind - the rational intellect - but creation must engage the whole mind. Science demands none of that ground swell of emotion, none of the rich bottom of personality, which fills out the work of art...

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements.

— Jacob Bronowski

With the... symbolic memory we spell out the future—not one but many futures, which we weigh one against another.

— 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...

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

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.

— Jacob Bronowski

Almost everything that we do that is worth doing is done in the first place in the mind's eye.

— 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...

— Jacob Bronowski

Imagination is the manipulation of images in one's head... the rational manipulation... as well as the literary and artistic manipulation.

— Jacob Bronowski

When a child begins to play games... he enters the gateway to reason and imagination together.

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality—physical and emotional.

— Jacob Bronowski

All great scientists have used their imaginations freely, and let it ride them to outrageous conclusions without crying "Halt!"

— 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 s.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

The symbol of the University is the iron statue outside the Rathskeller of a barefoot goose girl that every student kisses at graduation. The University is a Mecca to which students come with something less than perfect faith. 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

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.

— Jacob Bronowski

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.

— Jacob Bronowski

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 personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Jacob Bronowski

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.

— Jacob Bronowski

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

— Jacob Bronowski