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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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Jacob Bronowski
Age: 66 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 18
Died: 1974
Died: August 22
Biologist
Historian
Humanist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Poet
Television Presenter
Lodz
Together
Taking
Analyzing
Like
Pieces
Cliche
Says
Rainbow
Philosophy
Analysis
Imagination
Popular
Science
Begins
Art
Putting
Reductionism
Nature
Pure
Synthesis

More quotes by 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.
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The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
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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.
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In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.
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We gain our ends only with the laws of nature we control her only by understanding her laws.
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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.
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Power is the by-product of understanding.
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Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
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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.
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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.
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The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.
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You will die but the carbon will not its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.
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.
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To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues it means taking pleasure in them.
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Nature has not fitted man to any specific environment.
Jacob Bronowski
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It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.
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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.
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I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
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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.
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Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
Jacob Bronowski