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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONOf 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.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
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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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Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
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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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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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The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
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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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON