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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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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
Explored
Explorers
Exploring
Case
Cases
Nature
Never
Explorer

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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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After mastery comes artistry and not before.
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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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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.
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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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Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.
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A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
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There are no monotone values in biology.
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Multiple descriptions are better than one.
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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.
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The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.
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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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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.
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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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Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.
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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 are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
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No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
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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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The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
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