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 BATESONImprovisation 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.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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.
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Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
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The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
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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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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.
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Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
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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.
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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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When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.
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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.
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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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In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON