Quote

Multiple descriptions are better than one.

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
Descriptions
Multiple
Description
Better

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

Image
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
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
It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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
Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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
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
Image
The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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
People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
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
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
A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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
We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
Gregory Bateson
Image
Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
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
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
Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
Gregory Bateson