We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny. Jacob Bronowski More Quotes by Jacob Bronowski More Quotes From Jacob Bronowski Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture. Jacob Bronowski tests mind culture 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. Jacob Bronowski different work art The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold. Jacob Bronowski inheritance action children It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together. Jacob Bronowski imagination men science To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them. Jacob Bronowski intelligent knowing mean All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find. Jacob Bronowski giving philosophy two 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 have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve. Jacob Bronowski loss character two 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. Jacob Bronowski vocabulary nature science Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides. Jacob Bronowski real simple dream 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. Jacob Bronowski experience two science The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike. Jacob Bronowski discovery beauty art [John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature-a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules-out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer. Jacob Bronowski simple men science We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws. Jacob Bronowski understanding nature law But nature - that is, biological evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, ... he has a rather crude survival kit; and yet -this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments. Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it. Jacob Bronowski emotional animal men 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. Jacob Bronowski deep-thought unity art A genius is a man who has two great ideas. Jacob Bronowski men two ideas The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them. Jacob Bronowski diversity justice culture Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible. Jacob Bronowski tribute ascent knows Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer. Jacob Bronowski asking-questions courage science 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 animal science art
