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Information is a difference that makes a difference.

Gregory Bateson

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Gregory Bateson
Age: 76 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 9
Died: 1980
Died: July 4
Anthropologist
Biologist
Film Director
Linguist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Semiotician
Sociologist
Grantchester
Cambridgeshire
Differences
Information
Makes
Difference

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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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.
Gregory Bateson
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We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components, or Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course.
Gregory Bateson
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Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
Gregory Bateson
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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
Gregory Bateson
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Science probes it does not prove.
Gregory Bateson
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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Gregory Bateson
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Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
Gregory Bateson
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
Gregory Bateson
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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Gregory Bateson
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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 transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
Gregory Bateson
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The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the other the 'unconscious'
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson
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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
Gregory Bateson
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson
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There are no monotone values in biology.
Gregory Bateson
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson