Jacob Bronowski Quotes

It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and you can be wrong.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are

The scientist … creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity … is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers

If any expert or scientist reaches a conclusion or espouses a view that departs from the ideologue’s world view, it is the expert that he examines carefully and not his ideology.

I always admired Niels Bohr for uttering his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one in the possession of definite truth.

A lot of people are scared of experimentation because they think you have to be scientists, or they're also scared of it because it means that you have to admit that you don't know the answer. A lot of people like to assume they know the solution to a problem when they don't.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Investing is about intellectual honesty. You want to know what you know. You want to know, mostly, what you don't know.

One cannot be dogmatic about the right solution.

It's not the things you don't know that trip you up. It's the things you think you know, but you don't. You fail to ask a certain question because you believe you know the answer. Separating your information from your assumptions can be very tricky business.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

Our conjectures pass upon us for truths; we will know what we do not know, and often, what we cannot know: so mortifying to our pride is the base suspicion of ignorance.

While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.

He who claims to be sure of something for which there is no evidence is a fool, and he who acts on the basis of what cannot be proved is an imposter.

Intellectual modesty is humility as to what I know; intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.