Jacob Bronowski
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.Collection: Dream
Progress is the exploration of our own error.Collection: Errors
One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.Collection: Science
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.Collection: Book
The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Independence
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Original Thought
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.Collection: Metaphor
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.Collection: Sunday
When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton ... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.Collection: Mean
Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Animal
Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?Collection: Thinking
[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature-a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules-out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Integrity
That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.Collection: Men