We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard, ' 'small, ' 'heavy, ' 'yellow, ' 'dense, ' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.'. . And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time..Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things, ' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions). Gregory Bateson
The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.
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Courtney Love
Language is the key to the heart of people.
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Ahmed Deedat
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
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John Green
I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the...
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Stephen Fry
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
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Marcel Duchamp
More Quotes By Gregory Bateson
Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.
We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard, ' 'small, ' 'heavy, ' 'yellow, ' 'dense, ' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way...
The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
It is as if the stuff of which we are made were totally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Dreams and percepts and stories are...
Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.
