Bronowski Quotes

“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.”

“Every animal leaves traces of what it was man alone leaves traces of what he created. ”

“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.”

“We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.”

“Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

“Power is the by-product of understanding.”

“No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.”

“Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.”

“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.”

“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.”