108 Quotes by Gregory Bateson

Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.

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

Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.

It is as if the stuff of which we are made were totally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Dreams and percepts and stories are perhaps cracks and irregularities in the uniform and timeless matrix. Was this what Plotinus meant by an 'invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things'?

When we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.

A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life

We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose.

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.