Top 60 Gregory Bateson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The meaning of your communication is the response you get.”

— Gregory Bateson

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

— Gregory Bateson

3. “Without context words and actions have no meaning at all.”

— Gregory Bateson

4. “Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole.”

— Gregory Bateson

5. “It takes two to know one.”

— Gregory Bateson

6. “What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?”

— Gregory Bateson

7. “Information is a difference that makes a difference.”

— Gregory Bateson

8. “The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.”

— Gregory Bateson

9. “A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.”

— Gregory Bateson

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

— Gregory Bateson

11. “We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.”

— Gregory Bateson

12. “After mastery comes artistry and not before.”

— Gregory Bateson

13. “Science probes; it does not prove.”

— Gregory Bateson

14. “In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.”

— Gregory Bateson

15. “Life and ‘Mind’ are systemic processes.”

— Gregory Bateson

16. “The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour; more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.”

— Gregory Bateson

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

— Gregory Bateson

18. “No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.”

— Gregory Bateson

19. “Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.”

— Gregory Bateson

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

— Gregory Bateson

21. “Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.”

— Gregory Bateson

22. “There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.”

— Gregory Bateson

23. “Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.”

— Gregory Bateson

24. “Multiple descriptions are better than one.”

— Gregory Bateson

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Gregory Bateson

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Gregory Bateson

29. “Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship.”

— Gregory Bateson

30. “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

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

— Gregory Bateson

32. “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

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

— Gregory Bateson

34. “Number is different from quantity.”

— Gregory Bateson

35. “The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.”

— Gregory Bateson

36. “The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence.”

— Gregory Bateson

37. “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

38. “There are no monotone “values” in biology.”

— Gregory Bateson

39. “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

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

— Gregory Bateson

41. “People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.”

— Gregory Bateson

42. “Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.”

— Gregory Bateson

43. “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’”

— Gregory Bateson

44. “Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.”

— Gregory Bateson

45. “There are many matters and many circumstances in which consciousness is undesirable and silence is golden, so that secrecy can be used as a marker to tell us that we are approaching the holy.”

— Gregory Bateson

46. “If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.”

— Gregory Bateson

47. “Creative thought must always contain a random component.”

— Gregory Bateson

48. “Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.”

— Gregory Bateson

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

— Gregory Bateson

50. “A major difficulty is that the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is partly a product of the answers that we already have given to the riddle in its various forms.”

— Gregory Bateson