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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
Already
Product
Answers
Majors
Given
Major
Form
Forms
Difficulty
Various
Sphinx
Products
Riddle
Answer
Partly

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
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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.
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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.
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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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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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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'
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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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The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
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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.
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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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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