It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual Jacob Bronowski More Quotes by Jacob Bronowski More Quotes From Jacob Bronowski To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together. Jacob Bronowski animalscienceart The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry. Jacob Bronowski symbolsmetaphor Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created. Jacob Bronowski creativityanimalfunny It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy. Jacob Bronowski simplelawrunning 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 illuminationlightmean All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. Jacob Bronowski unity The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does. Jacob Bronowski personalitybelieveart 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. Jacob Bronowski powerfulkingshero 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 flowerteamworkpeople Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought. Jacob Bronowski independenceminddoe 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. Jacob Bronowski technologynaturescience 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. Jacob Bronowski notebookresponsibilityintegrity The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike. Jacob Bronowski discoverygivingorder There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts. Jacob Bronowski betrayalphilosophywar 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 errorsendsenough 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 analystssocialway 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 intuitionmademen The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture. Jacob Bronowski agriculturevillagemen The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel. Jacob Bronowski angelanimalbaby Power is the by-product of understanding. Jacob Bronowski productsunderstandingpower
