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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jacob Bronowski
Age: 66 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 18
Died: 1974
Died: August 22
Biologist
Historian
Humanist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Poet
Television Presenter
Lodz
Creatures
Shaper
Figures
Singular
Unique
Unlike
Among
Creature
Animal
Gifts
Make
Landscape
Men
Figure
Animals

More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

Image
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
Image
The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow , and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind , A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living , coiled, the spring .
Jacob Bronowski
Image
One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived - Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
Jacob Bronowski
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
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
Image
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
Image
To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues it means taking pleasure in them.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
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
Image
I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
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
Image
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.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
Jacob Bronowski