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There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance.

— Jacob Bronowski The Common Sense of Science (1951)

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More quotes by Jacob Bronowski

The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

Science and Human Values (1956)

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.

Science and Human Values (1956)

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.

The God Particle (1993)

We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex.

The Ascent of Man (1973)

In science and in art and in self-knowledge we explore and move constantly by turning to the world of sense to ask, Is this so?

Science and Human Values (1956)

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In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.

Louis Pasteur

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.

William Shakespeare Twelfth Night (1601)

O Fortune, cruellest of heavenly powers,
Why make such game of this poor life of ours?

Horace Satires (-35)

Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.

Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (1776)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jacob Bronowski (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.