A Quote by Gregory Bateson

Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls.

Gregory Bateson

Quote Topics

Balls Characteristics Mental Phenomena Pretend

Quote Author

Gregory Bateson
British - Scientist
May 9, 1904 - July 4, 1980

In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.

Gregory Bateson

A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls.

Terry Pratchett

Strictures, reproaches, and intemperate speeches from the Senator of Louisiana are really the wailings of an apostle of despair; he has lost control of himself, he is trying to play billiards with elliptical billiard balls and a spiral cue.

Huey Long

There are so many images pushed at women and so many ideas of what you're supposed to be. I think there's too much of this superwoman, this woman with a bottom like two billiard balls. There's no real celebration of just being a person.

Helen Fielding

Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls.

Walker Percy

Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.

Stephen Jay Gould

A Positive Mental Attitude is the right mental attitude. What is the right mental attitude? It is most often comprised of the "plus" characteristics symbolized by such words as faith, integrity, hope, optimism, courage, initiative, generosity, tolerance, tact, kindliness, and good common sense. A person with positive mental attitude aims for high goals and constantly strives to achieve them.

Napoleon Hill

I'm all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn't take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them.

Martin Seligman

I've had a lot of things thrown at me. A lot of coins that had been sharpened, billiard balls, and I had a dart thrown at my back at Burnley. And potatoes with razor blades.

Bruce Grobbelaar

Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.

Richard P. Feynman

To be a proactive person, you must learn to say no to most ideas and opportunities so you have the mental and physical bandwidth to execute the realistic business plans you have already mapped out.

Clay Clark

We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.

Umberto Eco

[George W. Bush] has balls. And he's a leader. Unfortunately his balls and leadership are in the service of shitty ideas. We need his balls on someone who thinks right.

Bill Maher

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

Robert Smithson

In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap.