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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

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Jacob Bronowski
Age: 66 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 18
Died: 1974
Died: August 22
Biologist
Historian
Humanist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Poet
Television Presenter
Lodz
Life
Return
Cycle
Animal
Grandchildren
Dies
Cycles
Ends
Carbon
Doe
Soil
May
Plant
Take
Career
Time
Careers
Sending

More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

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In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.
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The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Jacob Bronowski
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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 rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.
Jacob Bronowski
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Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.
Jacob Bronowski
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Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.
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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
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The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.
Jacob Bronowski
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A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
Jacob Bronowski
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Sex was invented as a biological instrument by (say) the green algae. But as an instrument in the ascent of man which is basic to his cultural evolution, it was invented by man himself.
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 over nature.
Jacob Bronowski
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Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
Jacob Bronowski
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Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
Jacob Bronowski