Polish-born mathematician (1908-1974)
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
Science and Human Values
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
The most important thing about a man is what he believes in the depth of his being.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
Freedom is valued in a culture that wants to encourage dissent and to stimulate originality and independence. It belongs to a society which is open to change, and which esteems the agent of change, the individual, above its own peace of mind.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Identity of Man
It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
Progress is the exploration of our own error.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination
Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
Many theories of the ancient world seem terribly childish today, a hodge-podge of fables and false comparisons. But our theories will seem childish five-hundred years from now. Every theory is based on some analogy, and sooner or later the theory fails because the analogy turns out to be false. A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
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.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
The richness of human life is that we have many lives; we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
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.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man
But, you see, it is rather puzzling why on the whole science took off about three hundred years ago and has been so very successful in expanding its kind of knowledge when on the whole the same cannot be said of the arts. Do not let me appear to denigrate the arts. I believe that we live in a period of literary and artistic creation quite as great as any of the past. And I think that this is just the way history works. If you are at a moment of obviously enormous scientific inventiveness (such as this century), then the world of the arts takes fire as well. But it takes fire in a different way. There is not this sense that somehow pop art is obviously much better than The Virgin of the Rocks. Whereas it is perfectly clear that the elucidation of the DNA molecule is a great deal better than those pictures of the homunculus which they used to draw in the fifteenth century.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination
The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
The Ascent of Man