Gregory Bateson Quotes

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

the brain, the mind, and all the things that happen inside it, it's a very erogenous zone.

How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.

Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life.

Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.

To live is to think.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

Physiology and psychology cover, between them, the field of vital phenomena; they deal with the facts of life at large, and in particular with the facts of human life.

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

Thought is the measure of life.

The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by an invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

Remembering is part of thinking, but not all of it.

First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.

The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.

Minds are simply what brains do.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.