Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowskiwas a British mathematician, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. Of Polish-Jewish origin, he is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth1 September 1908
men civilization imagination
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.
echoes choices males
The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.
baby angel animal
The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
moon thinking discovery
The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity.
wisdom nature men
Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
discovery statistics ability
The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.
art unity deep-thought
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.
organization vocabulary law
We receive experience from nature in a series of messages. From these messages we extract a content of information: that is, we decode the messages in some way. And from this code of information we then make a basic vocabulary of concepts and a basic grammar of laws, which jointly describe the inner organization that nature translates into the happenings and the appearances we meet.
nature science technology
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.
science two together
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.
law understanding gains
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
funny creativity men
Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
notebook integrity responsibility
Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures.
men age ascent
That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.