Gregory Bateson Quotes
Best 20 Quotes by Gregory Bateson
“After mastery comes artistry and not before.”
“All experience is subjective.”
“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.”
“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 D.N.A.”
“It takes two to know one.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Somebody was saying to Pablo 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?”
“Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.”
“The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.”
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”
“The map is not the territory and the name is not the thing named.”
“The meaning of your communication is the response you get.”
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“Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.”
“We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong.”
“We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.”
“Without context words and actions have no meaning at all”