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The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.

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
Power
Central
Opposition
Magic
Knowledge
Science

More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

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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
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Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding
Jacob Bronowski
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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 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 .
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Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
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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I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
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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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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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 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.
Jacob Bronowski
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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 largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
Jacob Bronowski
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The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Jacob Bronowski
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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.
Jacob Bronowski
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To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues it means taking pleasure in them.
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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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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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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Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.
Jacob Bronowski