“If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture.”

—  Gregory Bateson , book Naven

Gregory Bateson (1936) Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture p. 1

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the cult…" by Gregory Bateson?
Gregory Bateson photo
Gregory Bateson 49
English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual … 1904–1980

Related quotes

Saul Bellow photo

“We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

Great Jewish Short Stories, introduction to the Dell paperback edition (1963)
General sources
Context: We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.

“Thus we see that mysticism naturally, though not necessarily, becomes intimately associated with whatever is the religion of the culture in which it appears.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 25.

Patrick Buchanan photo

“The new hedonism seems unable to give people a reason to go on living. Its earliest fruits appear to be poisonous. Will this new "liberating" culture that our young have so enthusiastically embraced prove the deadliest carcinogen of them all? And if the West is in the grip of a "culture of death," as the pope contends and the statistics seem to show, is Western civilization about to follow Lenin's empire to the same inglorious end?”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, The Death of the West (2002)

Piet Mondrian photo

“Instinct reveals itself as self-concentrating, self-edifying it is limitation. Intuition produces self-denial, self-destruction； it is expansion. Culture can develop both. If it develops instinct, animal nature appears. Then culture destroys the intuitive capacity which men have even found in a primitive state.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 17

John Dewey photo

“In the late eighteenth and the greater part of the nineteenth centuries appeared the first marked cultural shift in the attitude taken toward change. Under the names of indefinite perfectibility, progress, and evolution, the movement of things in the universe itself and of the universe as a whole began to take on a beneficent instead of hateful aspect.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

“The notion of a language of the gods appears in Sanskrit, Greek, Old Norse and Hittite cultures.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VII Further Observations on Homer

Prevale photo

“The intelligent woman, will always be attracted by gentleness, sympathy, elegance, culture and respect. Not by appearance.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: La donna intelligente, sarà sempre attratta da dolcezza, simpatia, eleganza, cultura e rispetto. Non dall'apparenza.
Source: prevale.net

Prevale photo

“The intelligent woman, will always be attracted by gentleness, sympathy, elegance, culture and respect. Not by appearance.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: La donna intelligente, sarà sempre attratta da dolcezza, simpatia, eleganza, cultura e rispetto. Non dall'apparenza.
Source: prevale.net

Georg Brandes photo

“When does a state of culture prevail? When the men of a community are steadily working for the production of single great men. From this highest aim all the others follow. And what state is farthest removed from a state of culture? That in which men energetically and with united forces resist the appearance of great men, partly by preventing the cultivation of the soil required for the growth of genius, partly by obstinately opposing everything in the shape of genius that appears amongst them. Such a state is more remote from culture than that of sheer barbarism.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 12

Max Born photo

“Every object that we perceive appears in innumerable aspects. The concept of the object is the invariant of all these aspects.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

The close of his Nobel lecture: "The Statistical Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics" (11 December 1954) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1954/born-lecture.html
Context: Can we call something with which the concepts of position and motion cannot be associated in the usual way, a thing, or a particle? And if not, what is the reality which our theory has been invented to describe?
The answer to this is no longer physics, but philosophy. … Here I will only say that I am emphatically in favour of the retention of the particle idea. Naturally, it is necessary to redefine what is meant. For this, well-developed concepts are available which appear in mathematics under the name of invariants in transformations. Every object that we perceive appears in innumerable aspects. The concept of the object is the invariant of all these aspects. From this point of view, the present universally used system of concepts in which particles and waves appear simultaneously, can be completely justified. The latest research on nuclei and elementary particles has led us, however, to limits beyond which this system of concepts itself does not appear to suffice. The lesson to be learned from what I have told of the origin of quantum mechanics is that probable refinements of mathematical methods will not suffice to produce a satisfactory theory, but that somewhere in our doctrine is hidden a concept, unjustified by experience, which we must eliminate to open up the road.

Related topics