Bateson Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Gregory Bateson

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

Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been reared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all. — Mary Catherine Bateson

It was in the attempt to ascertain the interrelationships between species that experiments n genetics were first made. The words "evolution" and "origin of species" are now so intimately associated with the name of Darwin that we are apt to forger that the idea of common descent had been prominent in the mnds of naturalists before he wrote, and that, for more than half a century, zealous investigators had been devoting themselves to the experimental study of that possibility. Prominent among this group of experimenters may be mentioned Koelreauter, John Hunter, Herbert Knight, Gartner, Jordan. Naudin, Godron, Lecoq, Wichura
men whose names are familiar to every reader of Animals and Plants unders Domestication. — William Bateson

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

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster. — Gregory Bateson

A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them. — Gregory Bateson

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect. — Gregory Bateson

Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how. — Gregory Bateson

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction. — Gregory Bateson

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

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Treasure your exceptions. — William Bateson

Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

Information consists of differences that make a difference. — Gregory Bateson

As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition ... we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science. — Gregory Bateson

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

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

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

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

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

The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors. — Mary Catherine Bateson

It takes two to know one. — Gregory Bateson

I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a committee of Shakespeares. — William Bateson

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

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

I had repeatedly accepted inappropriate burdens, stepping in to do what needed to be done. In retrospect, I think I carried them well, but the cost was that I was chronically overloaded, weary, and short of time for politicking, smoothing ruffled feathers, and simply resting. — Mary Catherine Bateson

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions. — Gregory Bateson

Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity. — Gregory Bateson

Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man in power depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he causes things to happen ... it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation. — Gregory Bateson

Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole. — Gregory Bateson

Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stage takes shape. [p. 31] — Mary Catherine Bateson

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors. — Mary Catherine Bateson

A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance. — Gregory Bateson

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

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

Sharing is sometimes
more demanding than giving. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

It is not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many woman laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance. — Mary Catherine Bateson

What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don't want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it. — Gregory Bateson

Information is a difference that makes a difference. — Gregory Bateson

Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind. — Gregory Bateson

Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers. — Mary Catherine Bateson

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it. — Mary Catherine Bateson

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.
I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. — Gregory Bateson

Women watched for the spectacular performances of the men , and there can be no reasonable doubt that the presence of an audience is a very important factor in shaping the men's behavior. In fact, it is probable that the men are more exhibitionistic because the women admire their performances. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the spectacular behavior is a stimulus which summons the audience together, promoting in the women the appropriate behavior. — Gregory Bateson

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

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. — Gregory Bateson

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

There are no monotone "values" in biology. — Gregory Bateson

The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself. — Gregory Bateson

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong — Gregory Bateson

Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose. — William Bateson

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

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

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

A glad welcome to this affirmation by a group of psychologists that the self does not stop at the skin nor even with the circle of human relationships but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil; that caring for the deepest needs of persons and caring for our threatened planet are not in conflict. — Mary Catherine Bateson

In Darwin's time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon "Variation." Time has shown this mass of evidence to be capable of analysis. When first promulgated it produced the impression that variability was a phenomenon generally distributed amongst living things in such a way that the specific divisions must be arbitrary. When this variability is sorted out, and is seen to be in part a result of hybridisation, in part a consequence of the persistence of hybrids by parthenogenetic reproduction, a polymorphism due to the continued presence of individuals representing various combinations of Mendelian allelomorphs, partly also the transient effect of alteration in external circumstances, we see how cautious we must be in drawing inferences as to the indefiniteness of specific limits from a bare knowledge that intermediates exist. — William Bateson

Number is different from quantity. — Gregory Bateson

In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole. — Gregory Bateson

Self-care should include the cold shower as well as the scented tub. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money. — Gregory Bateson

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Things have to be done fast in America , and therefore therapy has to be brief. — Gregory Bateson

[The] defining characteristics of good prose [are]: a preference for short sentences diversified by an occasionally very long one; a tone that is relaxed and almost colloquial; a large vocabulary that enjoys exploiting the different etymological and social levels of words; and an insistence on verbal and logical precision. — F.W. Bateson

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

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

All experience is subjective. — Gregory Bateson

The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of
course you never do. — Gregory Bateson

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. — Gregory Bateson

Without context words and actions have no meaning at all — Gregory Bateson

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes. — Gregory Bateson

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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. — Gregory Bateson

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? — Gregory Bateson

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

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

Pathology is a relatively easy thing to discuss, health is very difficult. This, of course, is one of the reasons why there is such a thing as the sacred, and why the sacred is difficult to talk about, because the sacred is peculiarly related to the healthy. One does not like to disturb the sacred, for in general, to talk about something changes it, and perhaps will turn it into a pathology. — Gregory Bateson

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

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else. — Gregory Bateson

The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened. — Gregory Bateson

Often continuity is visible only in retrospect. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

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

A disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings. — Mary Catherine Bateson

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

In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored. — Gregory Bateson

The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy. — Mary Catherine Bateson

An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship. — Gregory Bateson