Quote

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

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
Never
Present
Phenomena
Time
Shall
Cover
Courses
Total
Course
Perception
Future
Indeed
Next
Series
Accounting
Able
Lead
Predict
Enough
Meet
Components

More quotes by 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
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
It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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
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
People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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
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
After mastery comes artistry and not before.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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
Science probes it does not prove.
Gregory Bateson
Image
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
Image
Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson
Image
Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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
Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
Gregory Bateson
Image
There are no monotone values in biology.
Gregory Bateson
Image
The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson