There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONJazz 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.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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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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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Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
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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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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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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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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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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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Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
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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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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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The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON