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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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Jacob Bronowski
Age: 66 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 18
Died: 1974
Died: August 22
Biologist
Historian
Humanist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Poet
Television Presenter
Lodz
Technology
Spells
Understanding
Failed
Force
Cast
Science
Casts
Nature
Atheism
Men
Masters
Succeeded
Looked
Spell
Magic
Skepticism

More quotes by 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.
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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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Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures.
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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.
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The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
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Power is the by-product of understanding.
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Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.
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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.
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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.
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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 the shaper of the landscape.
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All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.
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The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
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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The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.
Jacob Bronowski
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We gain our ends only with the laws of nature we control her only by understanding her laws.
Jacob Bronowski
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We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny.
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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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Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
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