Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

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.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Sorting gets harder as time goes on — it requires a sort of ruthless decisiveness, while indecision results in endless dithering. Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven't moved may begin to need a fire.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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.

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

Mary Catherine Bateson
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
A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples of different customs and assumptions meet.... What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility.

Mary Catherine Bateson
If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?

Mary Catherine Bateson