Quote

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

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
Thinking
Later
Atom
Air
Moses
Lived
Lungs
Anyone
Atoms
Ever
Sooner
Every
George
Michelangelo
Men
Washington
Breathes
Think
Breathe
Breathed

More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

Image
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
Image
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues it means taking pleasure in them.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
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
Image
The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
The world today is made, it is powered by science and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.
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
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
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
Image
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Jacob Bronowski
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
Jacob Bronowski