Identity of Man Quotes

“Freedom is valued in a culture that wants to encourage dissent and to stimulate originality and independence. It belongs to a society which is open to change, and which esteems the agent of change, the individual, above its own peace of mind.”
― Jacob Bronowski, Identity of Man

“We are not bound by commandments but by loyalties, and we have more loyalties than can be covered by fiat. We have to weigh their conflicting values for ourselves, on this occasion and on that, once in this favor and once in that, in the natural day to day of our conduct. In a complex and many-sided culture, we have to develop our ethic in our own actions, now within one group and now within another. Perhaps this group or that may have a book of rules for its members, but there can be no book to balance for any one of us, once for all, the loyalties that bind him to a dozen groups.”
― Jacob Bronowski, Identity of Man

“The poem and the drama is not the experience except as we identify ourselves with it, and know what it feels like to have it. What distinguishes literature is that it cannot be understood unless we understand what it is like to be human.”
― Jacob Bronowski, Identity of Man

“In trying to formalize a rule, we look for truth, but what we find is knowledge, and what we fail to find is certainty. This limitation has no special bearing on the knowledge of self.”
― Jacob Bronowski, Identity of Man

“But we are in any case mistaken if we think of our picture of the world as a passive record. The picture is made by, it is made of, our activity, all the way from the logic of the brain to the use of the plow and the wheel.”
― Jacob Bronowski, Identity of Man

“The brain cannot reach its inner conclusions by any logic of certainty. In place of this, the brain must do two things. It must be content to accept less than certain knowledge. And it must have statistical methods which are different in kind from ours, by which it reaches its acceptable level of uncertainty. By these means, the brain constructs a picture of the world which is less than certain yet highly interlocked in its parts.”
― Jacob Bronowski, Identity of Man