A Quote by Jacob Bronowski

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

Jacob Bronowski

Quote Topics

Metaphor Necessary Poetry Science Symbol

Quote Author

Jacob Bronowski
English - Scientist
January 18, 1908 - August 22, 1974

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

Ray Bradbury

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

Nikki Giovanni

That’s what i love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff were your not sure what the poets talking about. You may have an idea, but you cant be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in ?a symbol for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden, metaphor? ...I hated poetry until someone showed me how to appreciate it. He told me to see poetry as a puzzle. Its up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything they know about life and emotions.

Jay Asher

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

Patricia Hampl

[I]t is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

For me, I can't play a metaphor or a symbol.

Cody Fern

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become science.

James Russell Lowell

Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.

Nikki Giovanni

The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path.

Larry Dossey

Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

Henry Beston

A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol.

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.

Lawrence Durrell

Muse of poetry, come to his aid, I thought. Could the man produce one more metaphor of husbandry? He seemed to be trying. "Green wood," I suggested, but even he sensed that there was something unfortunate about a metaphor for a king in which you dry out your royalty before you set fire to it.