Gregory Bateson Quotes

As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman's arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.

The more one-dimensional an explanation of something complex and far reaching, the greater the grounds for skepticism.

Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.

Reductionism is merciless.

Truth lies in a small compass! The Aristotelians say, all truth is contained in Aristotle, in one place or another. Galileo makes Simplicius say so, but shows the absurdity of that speech by answering all truth is contained in a lesser compass, namely, in the alphabet.

The time will come when mankind will begin to get away from the consciousness of needing so many material things. More security and peace will be found in the simple life.

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.

To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.

Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.

What I am trying to do is to unmuddle the metaphysical.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre.

Too many escape into complexity these days. For it is an escape for persons to cry, when this question of the equality of peoples is raised in India or in our own South, 'Ah, but the situation is not so simple.' ... no great stride forward is ever made for the individual or for the human race unless the complex situation is reduced to one simple question and its simple answer.

Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It's the asshole, stupid.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

Money talks, but it don't sing and dance, and it don't walk. And long as I can have you here with me, I'd much rather be, forever in blue jeans.

Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.

YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots