Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONCaring 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.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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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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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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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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
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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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Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
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The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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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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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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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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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