Gregory Bateson Quotes

47 quotes in 708 categories

• All experience is subjective.
• 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…
• 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…
• Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.
• 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…
• Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.
• 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.…
• 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…
• Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.
• The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
• Desired substance, things, patterns, or sequences of experience that are in some sense "good" for the organism - items of diet, conditions of life, temperature,…
• 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…
• Information is a difference that makes a difference.
• Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
• Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family.
• It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
• Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
• It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
• Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
• Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause.

Browse Gregory Bateson Quotes by Category