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 BATESONThe human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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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The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
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Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
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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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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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Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
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Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
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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 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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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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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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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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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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON