The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
MARY CATHERINE BATESONSolutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
More Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
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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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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 BATESON -
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
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Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
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Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
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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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
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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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
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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Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
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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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
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.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON -
Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON