Gregory Bateson Quotes

The world you see is less of an indication about the world and more of an indication about your seeing.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

It's a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

I think the films Insomnia and Memento share all sorts of thematic concerns, such as the relationship between motivation and action, and the difficulty of reconciling your view of the story with the supposed objective view of that story.

I thought of a high school report I did on the Belgian artist Rene Magritte and a quote I once read from him, something about his favorite walk being the one he took around his own bedroom. He said that he never understood the need for people to travel because all the poetry and perspective you're ever going to get you already posses. Anais Nin had the same idea. We see the world as we are. So if it's the same brain we bring with us every time we open our eyes, what's the difference if we're looking at an island cove or a pocket watch?

The world begins with what we believe.

To know the world, one must construct it

Truth is only a question of point of view.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

A thing is a thing, not what is said of a thing

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.

You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

Nature is what you see plus what you think about it.