The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONImprovisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
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Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
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Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
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Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.
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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 BATESON -
The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
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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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A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.
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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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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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The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON