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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

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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?

All Gregory Bateson quotes →

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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)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

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.