Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

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.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

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.

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.

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.

Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.

The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.

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.

Solutions to problems often depend upon how they're defined.

...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.

A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

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.

Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

Real winners in a rapidly changing world will be those who are open to alternatives and able to respect and value those who are different.

An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect.