Quote

It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.

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
Anthropologists
Riddle
Devoted
Professional
Fifty
Years
Life
Anthropologist
Sphinx

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

Image
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
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
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
Image
Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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
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
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
Image
We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
Gregory Bateson
Image
Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Information is a difference that makes a difference.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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
Image
Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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
Image
Multiple descriptions are better than one.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Science probes it does not prove.
Gregory Bateson
Image
The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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
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