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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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Jacob Bronowski
Age: 66 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 18
Died: 1974
Died: August 22
Biologist
Historian
Humanist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Poet
Television Presenter
Lodz
Done
Loves
Men
Skills
Pleasure
Powerful
Doe
Better
Ascent
Wells
Skill
Well
Drive

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
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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Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
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The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
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 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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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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Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
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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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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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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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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Power is the by-product of understanding.
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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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