The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONAs 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.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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.
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The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
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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.
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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.
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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 -
A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.
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 -
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.
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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
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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.
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Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
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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.
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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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