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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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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
Referring
Quite
Clear
Whether
Never
World

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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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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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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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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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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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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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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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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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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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It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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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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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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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 creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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