Jacob Bronowski Quotes

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

  Jacob Bronowski

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• Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them he is not a figure in the landscape—he is the shaper of the landscape.

  Jacob Bronowski

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• The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation… The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

  Jacob Bronowski

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• 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.

  Jacob Bronowski

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• 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 on nature.

  Jacob Bronowski

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• At bottom, the society of scientists is more important than their discoveries. What science has to teach us here is not its techniques but its spirit: the irresistible need to explore.

  Jacob Bronowski

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

  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

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

  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

• 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 wish to hurt, the momentary intoxication with pain, is the loophole through which the pervert climbs into the minds of ordinary men.

  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

• The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.

  Jacob Bronowski

• The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

  Jacob Bronowski

• That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

  Jacob Bronowski

• Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

  Jacob Bronowski

• Power is the by-product of understanding.

  Jacob Bronowski

• 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

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Jacob Bronowski (30)

Birth:	18th January, 1908
Death:	22nd August, 1974
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Mathematician

About

Jacob Bronowski was born in Łódź, Poland. He was a Polish-born British mathematician, historian of science, poet and biologist. Of Polish-Jewish origin, he is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book. His family moved to Germany during the First World War, and then to Britain in 1920. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry. From 1934 to 1942 he taught mathematics at the University College of Hull. In 1950, he was given the Taung child's fossilized skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape in order to discriminate them from the teeth of apes. Work on this turned his interests towards the human biology of humanity's intellectual products. He was an associate director of the Salk Institute from 1964.

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