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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
Idea
Learn
Ideas
Nothing
Lack
Except
Possible
Wrong

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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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?
Gregory Bateson
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
Gregory Bateson
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In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Gregory Bateson
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There are no monotone values in biology.
Gregory Bateson
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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
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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson
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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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.
Gregory Bateson
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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.
Gregory Bateson
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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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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
Gregory Bateson
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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
Gregory Bateson
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Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
Gregory Bateson
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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
Gregory Bateson
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Information is a difference that makes a difference.
Gregory Bateson
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Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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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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