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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONWhat would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
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.
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 -
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 -
Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
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 -
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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON