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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONGoals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
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Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
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The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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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.
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We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
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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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The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
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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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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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The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
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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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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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There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON