Gregory Bateson Quotes

I guess I'm just quite observant and I pay attention to a lot of things. Human behavior really fascinates me.

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.

I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.

Nobody sees people as people. It's all how they relate to my little group.

We are all more connected than ever. That connectivity builds tolerance.

Relationships are our primary teacher. They are the context in which we either grow into God consciousness, or deny ourselves and others the opportunity to do so.

We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum.

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there."

If we do not love one another, we certainly shall not have much power with God in prayer.

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.

We don't set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts.

Through your love for each other, through learning the art of making one person happy, you learn to express your love for the whole of humanity and all beings. Please help us develop the curriculum for the Institute for the Happiness of One Person. Don't wait until we open the school. You can begin practicing right away.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.

A system is a set of things people, cells, molecules, or whatever interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.

the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry.

One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.

We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.

Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality.

Wherever you go, in every country, on every continent, people yearn and hunger for one thing: to love and be loved.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.