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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
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Differences
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More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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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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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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
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We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.
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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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
Gregory Bateson
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The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.
Gregory Bateson
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We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.
Gregory Bateson
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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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 rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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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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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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
Gregory Bateson