Quotes from Gregory Bateson

Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause.

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.

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?

Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.

Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it.

Whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience the larger whole is primarily beautiful.

Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship.

It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.

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

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 .

Science probes; it does not prove.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.

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.

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes.

Number is different from quantity.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

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.

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.

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.

Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think

Information is a difference that makes a difference.