Jacob Bronowski Quotes

Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word chance have any meaning.

Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled,...it is Art.

It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things; and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable.

The human brain has left and right brain symmetry with its own nature and can process information which initially appears to have no pattern or order. However, the brain has the ability to process visual information much more efficiently.

Nature's Laws are the invisible government of the earth.

What's a' your jargon o' your schools, Your Latin names for horns and stools; If honest nature made you fools.

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.

Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.

We must proceed with a full realization that no statute enacted by man can repeal the inexorable laws of nature.

The general laws of Nature are not, for the most part, immediate objects of perception.

There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God--a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.

I trust in Nature for the stable laws Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant And Autumn garner to the end of time. I trust in God,-the right shall be the right And other than the wrong, while he endures. I trust in my own soul, that can perceive The outward and the inward,-Nature's good And God's.

Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the complex and far-reaching physical consequences, a deep sense of respect for the power of the symmetry laws never fails to develop.

God is infinite; and the laws of nature, like nature itself, are finite. These methods of working, therefore, - which correspond to the physical element in us, - do not exhaust His agency. There is a boundless residue of disengaged energy beyond.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Science gives you an understanding of the physical world, and it increases the capacity for fascination.

Nature imitates herself. A grain thrown into good ground brings forth fruit; a principle thrown into a good mind brings forth fruit. Everything is created and conducted by the same Master-the root, the branch, the fruits-the principles, the consequences.

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

We are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America-you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.

Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.

I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.