Quote

The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.

Gregory Bateson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Pathology
Control
Courses
Course
Ever
Never

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

Image
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Science probes it does not prove.
Gregory Bateson
Image
No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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
Image
Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
Gregory Bateson
Image
In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
Gregory Bateson
Image
A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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
Image
Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
Gregory Bateson
Image
We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
Gregory Bateson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
After mastery comes artistry and not before.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson