Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.

Gregory Bateson
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The menu is not the meal. - Alan W. Watts

  2. Words are the clothes thoughts wear. - Samuel Beckett

  3. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. - George Steiner

  4. Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

  5. Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable. - Unknown

More Quotes By Gregory Bateson
  1. Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.

  2. 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...

  3. The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.

  4. 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...

  5. 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.

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