Gregory Bateson Quotes

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

I think each film should be regarded as its own specific text.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

The thing about metaphors is that, if you give them away, you give away the mystery.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

Knowing about authors' beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you've got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference.

I think I am intrigued by paradoxes. If something seems to be a paradox, it has something deeper, something worth exploring.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.

I love that people are still obsessively trying to understand and decode 'The Shining.' People want to find meaning in things that seemingly don't have meaning on the surface.

And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.