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

More quotes by 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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The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
Jacob Bronowski
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Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
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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The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.
Jacob Bronowski
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Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
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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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
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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 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 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
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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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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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Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
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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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
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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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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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We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
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