Jacob Bronowski Quotes

I shall devote only a few lines to the expression of my belief in the importance of science … it is by this daily striving after knowledge that man has raised himself to the unique position he occupies on earth, and that his power and well-being have continually increased.

I am trying to write stuff that is different. I am a big science fan. I read a lot of science, and 'Wonderland' has a lot of science in it. I don't know. They are hard to describe... We are living in a wonderland age of science.

The scientist is also a composer... You could think of science as discovering one particular thing - a supernova or whatever. You could also think of it as discovering this whole new way of seeing the world.

Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.

Science is a wonderful discipline, to which we are deeply indebted.

I believe that the quantum of our knowledge will increase considerably in the coming years and that scientists will continue to be amongst the brave voices speaking out.

Science moves fastest when there's plenty of debate and controversy.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

One of the things I sort of dreamt about awhile ago is that if Einstein were still alive, it would be absolutely wonderful to go to him and tell him about the discovery, and he would have been very pleased, I'm sure of that.

Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.

Again there is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress; which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error.

It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn't serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy.

The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

There are two - parallel - universes of science. One is the actual day-to-day work of scientists, patiently researching into all parts of the world and sometimes making amazing discoveries. The other is the role science plays in the public imagination - the powerful effect it has in shaping how millions of ordinary people see the world.

I see no difference between scientific exploration and human exploration.

Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search.

In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.

Real science can be far stranger than science fiction and much more satisfying.

It is characteristic of fundamental discoveries, of great achievements of the intellect, that they retain an undiminished power upon the imagination of the thinker. The memorable experiment of Faraday with a disc rotating between two poles of a magnet, which has borne such magnificent fruit, has long passed into every-day experience; yet there are certain features about this embryo of the present dynamos and motors which even today appear to us striking, and are worthy of the most careful study.

Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.

In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years - are still in their very earliest stages.

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.