Quotes from Jacob Bronowski

In trying to formalize a rule, we look for truth, but what we find is knowledge, and what we fail to find is certainty. This limitation has no special bearing on the knowledge of self.

We cannot separate the special importance of the visual apparatus of man from his unique ability to imagine, to make plans, and to do all the other things which are generally included in the catchall phrase free will. What we really mean by free will, of course, is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. In my view, which not everyone shares, the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Knowledge … is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

There are many gifts that are unique in man; but at the centre of them all, the root from which all knowledge grows, lies the ability to draw conclusions from what we see to what we do not see, to move our minds through space and time, and to recognise ourselves in the past on the steps to the present. All over these caves the print of the hand says: 'This is my mark. This is man.

The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.

The Renaissance established the dignity of man. The Industrial Revolution established the unity of nature. That

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.

Power is the by-product of understanding.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

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.

Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?

Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.

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.

Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.

"Sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has lived before us-Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses."

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.

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists, was science itself.

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.

The symbol of the University is the iron statue outside the Rathskeller of a barefoot goosegirl 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.

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.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.