Jacob Bronowski

One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.

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.

The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.

It is very much easier to divide your outlook on the world into two halves, to say that you know this belongs to the daily half and this belongs to the Sunday half.

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

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 a shaper of the landscape.

The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.

The paradox of knowledge is not confined to the small, atomic scale; on the contrary, it is as cogent on the scale of man, and even of the stars.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B.F. Skinner.

A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the ram- bow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.

The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.

The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.

The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.

It's a sort of curious phenomenon that God is somehow not quite as nice as the devil; the devil doesn’t punish you for behaving well, but God punishes you for behaving badly.

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a recreation of her.

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

The most wonderful discovery made by scientists is science itself.

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.

The human baby . . . is a mosaic of animal and angel.

We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

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

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

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