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If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture.

— Gregory Bateson Gregory Bateson (1936)

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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.

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?

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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.