82+ Gregory Bateson Quotes On Education, Ethics And World

Gregory Bateson was a British scientist, anthropologist, and cyberneticist. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work on the relationship between mind and body, and for coining the term "double bind". He was also a major contributor to the field of family therapy, and his work has had a lasting impact on the fields of anthropology, communication studies, and systems theory. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Gregory Bateson on education, life, ethics.

Top 10 Gregory Bateson Quotes

1. The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
2. 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?
3. What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?
4. If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.
5. Without context words and actions have no meaning at all
6. We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
7. The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
8. Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.
9. Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Things have to be done fast in America , and therefore therapy has to be brief.
• A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
• Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
• All experience is subjective.
• Creative thought must always contain a random component.
• Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
• Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.
• Multiple descriptions are better than one.
• No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
• It takes two to know one.

Gregory Bateson Quotes About Life

It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist. — Gregory Bateson

We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology. — Gregory Bateson

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes. — Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson Quotes About World

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics. — Gregory Bateson

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

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

Gregory Bateson Quotes About Nature

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

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

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

Gregory Bateson Quotes About Systems

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

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. — Gregory Bateson

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

Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole. — Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson Quotes About Quantity

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity. — Gregory Bateson

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. — Gregory Bateson

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong. — Gregory Bateson

Number is different from quantity. This difference is basic for any sort of theorizing in behavioral science, any sort of imagining of what goes on between organisms or inside organisms as part of their processes of thought. — Gregory Bateson

Number is different from quantity. — Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — Gregory Bateson

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

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. — Gregory Bateson

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future. — Gregory Bateson

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

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

Synaptic summation is the technical term used in neurophysiology for those instances in which some neuron C is fired only by a combination of neurons A and B. — Gregory Bateson

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

The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself. — Gregory Bateson

Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students - and even professional biologists - acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory. — Gregory Bateson

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else. — Gregory Bateson

Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man in power depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he causes things to happen... it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation. — Gregory Bateson

Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship. — Gregory Bateson

Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls. — Gregory Bateson

Perhaps the attempt to achieve grace by identification with the animals was the most sensitive thing which was tried in the whole bloody history of religion . — Gregory Bateson

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

Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth. — Gregory Bateson

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

After mastery comes artistry and not before. — Gregory Bateson

Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive. — Gregory Bateson

If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture. — Gregory Bateson

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

Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause. — Gregory Bateson

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

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

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

If we pursue this matter further, we shall be told that the stable object is unchanging under the impact or stress of some particular external or internal variable or, perhaps, that it resists the passage of time. — Gregory Bateson

Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family. — Gregory Bateson

Information consists of differences that make a difference. — Gregory Bateson

People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them. — Gregory Bateson

What we mean by information - the elementary unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them. — Gregory Bateson

There are no monotone "values" in biology. — Gregory Bateson

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

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. — Gregory Bateson

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

Science probes; it does not prove. — Gregory Bateson

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

Pathology is a relatively easy thing to discuss, health is very difficult. This, of course, is one of the reasons why there is such a thing as the sacred, and why the sacred is difficult to talk about, because the sacred is peculiarly related to the healthy. One does not like to disturb the sacred, for in general, to talk about something changes it, and perhaps will turn it into a pathology. — Gregory Bateson

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new. — Gregory Bateson

Information is a difference that makes a difference. — Gregory Bateson

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are-objective pictures. He mumbled that he wasn't quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, "There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is." Picasso looked at it and said, "She is rather small, isn't she? And flat?" — Gregory Bateson

What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don't want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it. — Gregory Bateson

The meaning of your communication is the response you get. — Gregory Bateson

Life Lessons by Gregory Bateson

1. Gregory Bateson's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of all things, and the need to consider the whole system when making decisions.
2. He also demonstrated the power of communication and understanding to bridge the gap between humans and nature, and to create a more sustainable and harmonious relationship between the two.
3. His contributions to the fields of anthropology, psychology, and cybernetics have provided us with valuable lessons about the importance of understanding context and the need to think holistically.