Jacob Bronowski: Trending quotes

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Jacob Bronowski: 158 quotes3 likes

“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 The Ascent of Man

Episode 13: "The Long Childhood"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

“When a child begins to play games… he enters the gateway to reason and imagination together.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Dissent is the mark of freedom.”

Jacob Bronowski

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Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

“I am using the word image in a wide meaning, which does not restrict it to the mind's eye as a visual organ. An image in my usage is what Charles Pierce called a sign…”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Let me end with… man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon…. Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with… fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas… wrote… The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy… they all tried to guess where… earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—… the wrong law.
All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he… came to conceive… that the moon is like a ball… thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon… he went on to calculate how long… the distant moon would take to round the earth… [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“[S]ymbols have a reach and a roundness that goes beyond their literal and practical meaning. They are the rich concepts under which the mind gathers many particulars into one name, and many instances into one general induction.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“[A]ll our symbols have the same purpose; words are merely the symbols we use most commonly. The function of words in human thought is to stand for things which are not present to the senses, and allow the mind to manipulate them—things, concepts, ideas, everything that does not have a physical reality in front of us now.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

“With the… symbolic memory we spell out the future—not one but many futures, which we weigh one against another.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“There is today almost no scientific theory which was held when, say, the Industrial Revolution began about 1760. Most often today's theories flatly contradict those of 1760; many contradict those of 1900. In cosmology, in quantum mechanics, in genetics, in the social sciences, who now holds the beliefs that seemed firm sixty years ago? Yet the society of scientists has survived these changes without a revolution, and honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares. No one has recanted abjectly at a trial before his colleagues. The whole structure of science has been changed and no one has been either disgraced or deposed. Through all the changes of science, the society of scientists is flexible and single-minded together, and evolves and rights itself. In the language of science, it is a stable society.”

Jacob Bronowski

as quoted in American Journal of Physics, 44(2), p176, 1976-02
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Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

“Newton was born during Cromell's revolution in the troubled 1640s; he was eighteen at the Restoration in 1660; and he published the Principia during the intrigues which ended by bringing William of Orange to England in the revolution of 1688. These are the moments when the powerful or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoughts quicken…”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Scientific Revolution and the Machine"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

“The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived — Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.”

Jacob Bronowski

The Reader's Digest (1964) Vol. 84; also quoted in Structure and Plan (1974) by Glen A. Love, p. 154

“I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. …It is… an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into… relevant and… irrelevant. We make a cut. We put the experiment… into a box. …the moment we do that, we do violence to the connections …I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. …I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about the world is a lie. …it is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. Therefore, 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.”

Jacob Bronowski

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

“What we really mean by free will… is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. …the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.”

Jacob Bronowski

The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

“The language of ideas creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in the English dictionary.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

“In every age there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world. It is frozen in the statues of Easter Island that put a stop to time—and in the medieval clocks of Europe that once also seemed to say the last word about the heavens for ever. Each culture tries to fix its visionary moment, when it was transformed by a new conception either of nature or of man. But in retrospect, what commands our attention as much are the continuities—the thoughts that run or recur from one civilization to another.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Source: The Ascent of Man (1973), Ch. 1 Lower than the Angels.

“[I]magination… is the faculty… the common root from which science and literature… spring and grow and flourish together. …the great ages of science are the great ages of all the arts… [P]owerful minds have taken fire from one another… without asking… to tie their imagination to falling balls or a haunted island. …When Galileo was looking through his telescope at the moon, Shakespeare was writing The Tempest and all Europe was in ferment, from Johannes Kepler to Peter Paul Rubens, and from the first table of logarithms by John Napier to the Authorized version of the Bible.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“The strength of the imagination, its enriching power and excitement, lies in its interplay with reality—physical and emotional.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

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

Jacob Bronowski

Part 1: "The Creative Mind", §9 (p. 20)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

“Imagination is the manipulation of images in one's head… the rational manipulation… as well as the literary and artistic manipulation.”

Jacob Bronowski

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)