Gregory Bateson Quotes
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?
If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.
There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.
The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.
Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.
Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.
The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.
Some tools of thought are so blunt that they are almost useless; others are so sharp that they are dangerous. But the wise man will have the use of both kinds.
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.
It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.
Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.
Perhaps the attempt to achieve grace by identification with the animals was the most sensitive thing which was tried in the whole bloody history of religion .
Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.
A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.
Synaptic summation is the technical term used in neurophysiology for those instances in which some neuron C is fired only by a combination of neurons A and B.
There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.
Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.
