The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONOften continuity is visible only in retrospect.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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 -
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 -
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 -
Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
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 -
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 -
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
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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 -
In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
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