The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONEvery loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.
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Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
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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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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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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
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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.
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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 -
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 -
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 -
Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
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.
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON