Quotes by Mary Catherine Bateson - Page 1

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Illusion
Memorable
Way
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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Blinkers
Defined
Goal
Goals And Objectives
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Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Continuity
Perspective
Retrospect
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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Journey
Knowledge
Peace
Giving
Memorable
Demanding
Sharing
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Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Food
Cooking
Culinary
Human Beings
Nutrients
Eat
Beings
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Graduation
Educational
Memorable
Willing To Learn
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Defined
Depends
Problem
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The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Inspirational
Inspiring
Thinking
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Teacher
Forgotten
Good Teacher
Lessons
Teaching
Quickly
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Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Discontinuity
Fluidity
Reality
Central
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The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Capacity
Commitment
Democracy
Essentials
Skepticism
Combine
Essential
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Metaphor
Thinking
Toxic
Few Things
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Creativity
Lasts
Way
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The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Change
Death
Changed
Dying
Giving
Timing
Like
Ending
Gives
Meaning
Story
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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Conventions
Natural
Sacred
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Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Echoes
Identity
Loss
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The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Cute
Smile
Looks
Metaphor
Understanding
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The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Understanding
Broaden
Changing
Disappearing
Metaphors
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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Empowering
Past
Pathways
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A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Numbers
Physicians
Training
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When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Parent
Past
Realization
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What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Color
Culture
Vision
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Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Peace
History
Members
Tradition
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Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Inspirational
Good Place
Memorable
Stopping
Life Good Will
Remain
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a really nice man who wishes she were not.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Discover
Man Woman Always
Happily
Pleases
Wishes
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Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Nature
Bending Down
Children
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As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Art
Life
Morning
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Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Design
Caring
Memorable
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The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Religion
Imagination
Christian
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Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Change
Entertainment
Positive Experiences
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...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Elements
Reflection
Trying
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Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Believe
Diversity
Understanding
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Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Music
Support
Time Flies
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Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Answers
Coherence
Patterns
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The caretaking has to be done. "Somebody's got to be the mommy." Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Done
Needs
Steps
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We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, which allows us to grow.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Effort
Knowing
People
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The critical question about regret is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring. [p. 199]
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Mistake
People
Regret
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Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Age
Important
Way
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... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. ... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Love
Age
Three
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I had repeatedly accepted inappropriate burdens, stepping in to do what needed to be done. In retrospect, I think I carried them well, but the cost was that I was chronically overloaded, weary, and short of time for politicking, smoothing ruffled feathers, and simply resting.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Cost
Done
Thinking
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When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Peace
Children
Differences
Parent
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A glad welcome to this affirmation by a group of psychologists that the self does not stop at the skin nor even with the circle of human relationships but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil; that caring for the deepest needs of persons and caring for our threatened planet are not in conflict.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Animal
Caring
Self
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Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Games
Lying
Play
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Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been reared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Women
Sports
Teamwork
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In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Life
Teacher
Moving
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Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Games
Memories
Thinking
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Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.
Mary Catherine Bateson / Writer
Biblical
Ideas
Opposites
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Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes - Page 1

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