Quote

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.

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
Among
Creature
Animal
Gifts
Make
Landscape
Men
Figure
Animals
Creatures
Shaper
Figures
Singular
Unique
Unlike

More quotes by 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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It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.
Jacob Bronowski
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It is very much easier to divide your outlook on the world into two halves, to say that you know this belongs to the daily half and this belongs to the Sunday half.
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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I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
Jacob Bronowski
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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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The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
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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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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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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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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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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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 largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
Jacob Bronowski
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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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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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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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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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The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.
Jacob Bronowski