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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, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay...

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
Live
Pay
Human
Thousand
Humans
Events
Many
Happen
Vividly
Life
Dies
Deaths
Lives
Thereby
Happens
Richness
Cannot
Price

More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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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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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
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Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
Jacob Bronowski
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Power is the by-product of understanding.
Jacob Bronowski
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Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Jacob Bronowski
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Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.
Jacob Bronowski
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The world today is made, it is powered by science and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.
Jacob Bronowski
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Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.
Jacob Bronowski
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The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.
Jacob Bronowski
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I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
Jacob Bronowski
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The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
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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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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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