Gregory Bateson Quotes - Page 2

Multiple descriptions are better than one.

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

Creative thought must always contain a random component.

Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.

In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.

The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.

The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.

The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.

Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.

Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].

In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.

Science probes; it does not prove.

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.

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

Information consists of differences that make a difference.

Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and down of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.

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.

Desired substance, things, patterns, or sequences of experience that are in some sense "good" for the organism - items of diet, conditions of life, temperature, entertainment, sex, and so forth - are never such that more of the something is always better than less of the something. Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.

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'

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.