We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONThe 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.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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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The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
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The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
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Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
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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.
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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.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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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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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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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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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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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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON