Quote

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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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
Mental
Bottom
Alive
Together
Interconnections
Whole
Interconnection
Right
Fabric
Metaphor
Holds

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
Gregory Bateson
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There are no monotone values in biology.
Gregory Bateson
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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?
Gregory Bateson
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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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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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
Gregory Bateson
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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
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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.
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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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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
Gregory Bateson
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson
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It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.
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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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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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