Quotes from Jacob Bronowski

We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.

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.

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 and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

A genius is a man who has two great ideas.

I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into–into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions … into extrasensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

You cannot love the girl without being conscious of the fact that she has yellow hair, you cannot see the world without the intervention of the physical senses.

There is one gift above all others that makes man unique among the animals, and it is the gift displayed everywhere here: his immense pleasure in exercising and pushing forward his own skill.

The poem and the drama is not the experience except as we identify ourselves with it, and know what it feels like to have it. What distinguishes literature is that it cannot be understood unless we understand what it is like to be human.

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.

The democracy of the intellect comes from the printed book…

The brain cannot reach its inner conclusions by any logic of certainty. In place of this, the brain must do two things. It must be content to accept less than certain knowledge. And it must have statistical methods which are different in kind from ours, by which it reaches its acceptable level of uncertainty. By these means, the brain constructs a picture of the world which is less than certain yet highly interlocked in its parts.

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.

power is the by-product of understanding. So the Greeks said that Orpheus played the lyre with such sympathy that wild beasts were tamed by the hand on the strings. They did not suggest that he got this gift by setting out to be a lion tamer.

But we are in any case mistaken if we think of our picture of the world as a passive record. The picture is made by, it is made of, our activity, all the way from the logic of the brain to the use of the plow and the wheel.

These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilisation which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. That is the failure of the New World cultures, dying in their own symbolic Ice Age.

cultural evolution; once it takes off, it goes as the ratio of those two numbers goes, at least a hundred times faster than biological evolution.

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or a scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before, and this gives him a sense at the same time of richness and of understanding. The creative mind is a mind that looks for unexpected likenesses.

We become more and more aware that what we think about the world is not what the world is but what the human animal sees of the world.

The new theory, of course, always subsumes more effects than the old. But the remarkable thing is that when it is discovered, it also wholly changes our conception of how the world works.

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action.

But it is of critical importance to ask ourselves what features which other animals do not possess have given human beings the very special capacities with which we are concerned in these lectures: the ability to utter cognitive sentences (which no other animal can do) and the ability therefore to exercise knowledge and imagination.

When] we practice science (and this is true of all our experience), we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.