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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

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Knowledge

More quotes by Gregory Bateson

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

p. 148 as cited in: C.H. Patterson (1958)

Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.

The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named (see also, Alfred Korzybski).

The world partly becomes — comes to be — how it is imagined.

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

All Gregory Bateson quotes →

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You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gregory Bateson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.