"And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into—into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United KingdomMathematicians from PolandHistorians of scienceMathematicians from the United KingdomBiologists from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Episode 13: "The Long Childhood"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacob_Bronowski
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski (January 18, 1908 – August 22, 1974) was a British mathematician, biologist, and science historian of Polish origin. He is remembered as the writer and presenter of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man.
111 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jacob Bronowski →
Related Quotes
"Science is not a special sense. It is as wide as the literal meaning of its name: knowledge."
"We cannot change our character, we can only enlarge it. If we are wise, then we go on learning all through life, and …"
"These are the moments when the powerful mind or the forceful character feels the ferment of the times, when his thoug…"
"The air in a man's lungs contains 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breat…"
"I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two lang…"
"The most modest research worker at his bench, pushing a probe into a neuron to measure the electric response when a l…"
"The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike…"
"It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible…"
"The sneer that science is only critical came from others. It was made by the timid and laboured artists of the nineti…"
"Unhappily, common sense has no recorded history."