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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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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
Answer
Partly
Already
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Given
Major
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Forms
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Various
Sphinx
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Riddle
More quotes by Gregory Bateson
There are no monotone values in biology.
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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
The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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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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Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
Gregory Bateson
A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
Gregory Bateson
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
After mastery comes artistry and not before.
Gregory Bateson
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
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
Multiple descriptions are better than one.
Gregory Bateson
The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson
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
Science probes it does not prove.
Gregory Bateson
In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Gregory Bateson
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
Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson
People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
Gregory Bateson
The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson
