Top 100 Bateson Quotes
#1. That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about - the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible
Terry Tempest Williams
#2. Gregory Bateson said, "The source of all our problems today comes from the gap between how we think and how nature works.
Anonymous
#4. A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#5. Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#6. Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].
Gregory Bateson
#8. 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
#9. I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a committee of Shakespeares.
William Bateson
#10. Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
Gregory Bateson
#11. It's all about being in control of myself as an older woman who lives alone, and it's all about how I am going to do what I have to do to be as strong as I can be and be confident that I can do what I need to do as an older person. [p. 62]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.
Gregory Bateson
#16. 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
#17. Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money.
Gregory Bateson
#18. What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#19. The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
Gregory Bateson
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
Gregory Bateson
#25. The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think
Gregory Bateson
#26. Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#28. Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#29. Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#30. Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas,enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#31. Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities. [p. 38]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#32. The caretaking has to be done. "Somebody's got to be the mommy." Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#33. Mum's mobile was the most immoblie cell phone in the world. It often lived on the top of the bookshelf closest to the front door. It was there so she'd see it before she left the house. The trouble was, Mum was alwayd leaving the house in a mad rush and the mobile stayed put.
Catherine Bateson
#34. When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return ...
Mary Catherine Bateson
#37. If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?
Mary Catherine Bateson
#38. The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.
Gregory Bateson
#40. It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
Gregory Bateson
#41. Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause.
Gregory Bateson
#42. 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
#43. Sorting gets harder as time goes on
it requires a sort of ruthless decisiveness, while indecision results in endless dithering. Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven't moved may begin to need a fire. [p. 38]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#45. Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.
Gregory Bateson
#46. As we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received. [p. 88]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#47. Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship.
Gregory Bateson
#49. 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
#50. So this little boy was
I became her confidant a little too early, I think. It didn't seem to warp me exactly, but it left me with a little too much knowledge at an early age. [p. 143]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#51. The critical question about regret is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring. [p. 199]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#52. Members of weakly religious families get, of course, no religious training from any source outside the family.
Gregory Bateson
#54. No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a really nice man who wishes she were not.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#55. The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
Gregory Bateson
#56. 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
#57. It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Gregory Bateson
#58. 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
#59. 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
#61. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
Gregory Bateson
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Active wisdom
an entire cohort with something new to offer to the world as years of experience combined with continuing health. [p. 52]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#66. As people grow older, some of the ways they have contributed in the past may no longer be possible, but the challenge to society is not only to provide help and care where these are needed but also to offer the opportunity to contribute and care for others [p. 8]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#68. For some of us, "chauvinism" is simply a shortening of "male chauvinism." For others, it is a reminder of the dangers of devotion to the superiority of any group, gender, race, religion, or nation, or even to the truths of any era.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#69. 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
#70. Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#71. We are water. We are air. We grow, we bloom, we seed, we wilt, we die. There is a false separation between humanity and nature. Of
Nora Bateson
#72. The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#73. We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.
Gregory Bateson
#74. After all, most of us have lived lives based on commitments made without any way of knowing where they would lead. The uncertainty is an essential element in commitment, the acceptance of consequences an essential element in fidelity. [p. 80]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#75. Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#76. Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
#77. Without context words and actions have no meaning at all
Gregory Bateson
#78. 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
#79. Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
Gregory Bateson
#81. In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Gregory Bateson
#82. The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of
course you never do.
Gregory Bateson
#83. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#85. A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples of different customs and assumptions meet.... What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#86. We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong
Gregory Bateson
#87. We never promised we would stay the same,/But only we would shape our change/From this now single clay.[p. 82]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#88. Things have to be done fast in America , and therefore therapy has to be brief.
Gregory Bateson
#89. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#90. Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#91. Information consists of differences that make a difference.
Gregory Bateson
#92. There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.
Gregory Bateson
#93. Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
Gregory Bateson
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. When we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.
Gregory Bateson
#98. 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.
Gregory Bateson
#100. Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.
Gregory Bateson
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