108 Quotes by Gregory Bateson

The psychedelics are a powerful educational tool. They are the surest way to learn the arbitrariness of our ordinary perception. Many of us have had to use them to find out how little we knew.

Life and ‘Mind’ are systemic processes.

Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students – and even professional biologists – acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory.

Yes, metaphor. That’s how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

There are no monotone “values” in biology.

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’

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong.

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.

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.