Quotes by Jacob Bronowski

About Jacob Bronowski:

Jacob Bronowski is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Jacob Bronowski

Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.

Jacob Bronowski

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

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogm...

Jacob Bronowski

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

Jacob Bronowski

Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both ...

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

The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

Jacob Bronowski

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

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

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.

Jacob Bronowski

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Jacob Bronowski

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.

Jacob Bronowski

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

Jacob Bronowski

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

Jacob Bronowski

The world is full of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.

Jacob Bronowski

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

Jacob Bronowski

The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.

Jacob Bronowski

And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. 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

Author Bio

  • NameJacob Bronowski
  • DescriptionMathematician
  • BornJanuary 18, 1908
  • DiedAugust 22, 1974
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionMathematician; Poet