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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
Powerful
Doe
Better
Ascent
Wells
Skill
Well
Drive
Done
Loves
Men
Skills
Pleasure

More quotes by 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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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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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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Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
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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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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I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
Jacob Bronowski
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In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.
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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Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Jacob Bronowski
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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
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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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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
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Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
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 human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
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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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
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The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
Jacob Bronowski