Jacob Bronowski - Collected Quotes

"Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her - than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Common Sense of Science", 1953) 

"There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Common Sense of Science", 1953) 

"We cannot define truth in science until we move from fact to law. And within the body of laws in turn, what impresses us as truth is the orderly coherence of the pieces. They fit together like the characters of a great novel, or like the words of a poem. Indeed, we should keep that last analogy by us always, for science is a language, and like a language it defines its parts by the way they make up a meaning. Every word in a sentence has some uncertainty of definition, and yet the sentence defines its own meaning and that of its words conclusively. It is the internal unity and coherence of science which gives it truth, and which makes it a better system of prediction than any less orderly language." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Common Sense of Science", 1953)

"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, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. That is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"Mathematics in this sense is a form of poetry, which has the same relation to the prose of practical mathematics as poetry has to prose in any other language. The element of poetry, the delight of exploring the medium for its own sake, is an essential ingredient in the creative process." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them."  (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"Science is the creation of concepts and their exploration in the facts. It has no other test of the concept than its empirical truth to fact." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956) 

"The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"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, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"[…] the human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight […] induction, which - like other forms of imagination - cannot be formalized." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Reach of Imagination", 1967)

"Nature is a network of happenings that do not unroll like a red carpet into time, but are intertwined between every part of the world; and we are among those parts. In this nexus, we cannot reach certainty because it is not there to be reached; it goes with the wrong model, and the certain answers ironically are the wrong answers. Certainty is a demand that is made by philosophers who contemplate the world from outside; and scientific knowledge is knowledge for action, not contemplation. There is no God’s eye view of nature, in relativity, or in any science: only a man’s eye view." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Identity of Man", 1972)

"Discovery is a double relation of analysis and synthesis together. As an analysis, it probes for what is there; but then, as a synthesis, it puts the parts together in a form by which the creative mind transcends the bare limits, the bare skeleton, that nature provides."(Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)

"Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)

"Physics is not events but observations. Relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but as relations."  (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)

"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." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)

"That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973) 

"The pre-eminence of astronomy rests on the peculiarity that it can be treated mathematically; and the progress of physics, and most recently biology, has hinged equally on finding formulations of their laws that can be displayed as mathematical models." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)

"[Human consciousness] depends wholly on our seeing the outside world in such categories. And the problems of consciousness arise from putting reconstitution beside internalization, from our also being able to see ourselves as if we were objects in the outside world. That is in the very nature of language; it is impossible to have a symbolic system without it." (Jacob Bronowski, "The origins of knowledge and imagination", 1978)