Gregory Bateson Quotes

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. Many symbols are mere "survivals" - as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness.

The map is not the territory.

The motion of the mind is conveyed along a cloud of meaning.~ There is this paradox that we get to meaning only when we strip the meaning from symbols.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.

Language is memory and metaphor.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.

I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk?

There is the name and the thing; the name is a sound which sets a mark on and denotes the thing. The name is no part of the thing nor of the substance; it is an extraneous piece added to the thing, and outside of it.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

Words are the motes of thought, and nothing more.

All names of good and evil are images; they do not speak out, they only hint. He is a fool who seeks knowledge from them.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

An object never serves the same function as its image - or its name.