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If I were giving this lecture fifty years from now, the word "gravitation" would be as old-fashioned as the word "phlogiston" is to us. Relativity has certainly demoted gravitation as a real explanation, just as Priestley's and Lavoisier's analyses and decoding of chemical reactions destroyed the word "phlogiston."

— Jacob Bronowski The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978)

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Science

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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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features.

Freeman Dyson Infinite in All Directions (1988)

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

Henri Poincaré Science and Hypothesis (1901)

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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.