Gregory Bateson
All experience is subjective.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Learning
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.Collection: Science
Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.Collection: Communication
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.
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?
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.
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.
It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
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.
It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.
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.
Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
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.
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.
Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause.
Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family.
Number is different from quantity.
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.
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.
Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.
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.
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.
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.Collection: Nature
Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole.Collection: Whole
Without context words and actions have no meaning at allCollection: Action
The meaning of your communication is the response you get.Collection: Communication
A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.Collection: Men
The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.Collection: Winning
We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.Collection: World
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.Collection: Spiritual
It takes two to know one.Collection: Two
Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.Collection: Together
Information is a difference that makes a difference.Collection: Differences
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?"Collection: Bullying
Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship.Collection: Play
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?Collection: Orchids
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Men
The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.Collection: World
There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.Collection: Believe
After mastery comes artistry and not before.Collection: Mastery
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.Collection: Healthy
No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.Collection: Levels
In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.Collection: Cases
Creative thought must always contain a random component.Collection: Creative
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.Collection: Numbers