Quotes by Gregory Bateson

“We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is ...”

“Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.”

“The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.”

“It is as if the stuff of which we are made were totally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that tra...”

“Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of ca...”

“Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a...”

“Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.”

“Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.”

“In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural trans...”

“All experience is subjective.”

“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.”

“We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby s...”

“Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience the larger whole is primarily beautiful.”

“Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience the larger whole is primarily beautiful.”

“Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; whenever we start insisting too hard upon operationalism or symbolic logic or any other of these very essent...”

“If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to t...”

“Schizophrenia--its nature, etiology, and the kind of therapy to use for it--remains one of the most puzzling of the mental illnesses. The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communic...”

“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 nex...”

“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.”

“Women watched for the spectacular performances of the men, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the presence of an audience is a very important factor in shaping the men's behavior. In fact, i...”