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Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.

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
Ideas
Nothing
Lack
Except
Possible
Wrong
Idea
Learn

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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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.
Gregory Bateson
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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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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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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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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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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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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
Gregory Bateson
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Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
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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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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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Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
Gregory Bateson
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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'
Gregory Bateson
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
Gregory Bateson
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People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.
Gregory Bateson
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Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson
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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
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
Gregory Bateson