Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Jacob Bronowski
2
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
3
It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
Jacob Bronowski
4
Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
Jacob Bronowski
5
Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.
Jacob Bronowski
6
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
7
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
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
10
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
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
13
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
14
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
Jacob Bronowski
15
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
16
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
17
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.
Jacob Bronowski
18
You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.
Jacob Bronowski
