“We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, "Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components," or "Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course.”
Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 29
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Gregory Bateson 49
English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual … 1904–1980Related quotes

Speech to the Good-will Foundation (9 March 1991)
1990s

“Doubtless the day is far in the future when we shall be able to solve such historical enigmas.”
August 1909, Popular Science Monthly Volume 75, Article:"The Varificational Factor in Handwriting", p. 156

Source: "Gong Yoo talks life, death and 20 years in the business" in Korea JoongAng Daily https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2021/04/19/entertainment/movies/Gong-Yoo-actor-interview/20210419145803689.html (19 April 2021)

Variant translation by Pearl S. Buck: "Alas, I was born to die! How can I know what those who come after me and read my book will think of it? I cannot even know what I myself, born into another incarnation, will think of it. I do not even know if I myself afterwards can even read this book. Why therefore should I care?" (All Men are Brothers, 1933; p. xiii)
Preface to Water Margin

Speech to the National Liberal Club (11 December 1908), quoted in The Times (12 December 1908), p. 10
Prime Minister

“What a beautiful step! I shall never be able to do it.”
As quoted in Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998) edited by Paula Kay Byers and Suzanne Michele Bourgoin, Vol. Hox-Kie, p. 504

Postscriptum
Cagliostro’s Letter to the English People (1787)
Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)