Mary Catherine Bateson Short Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

View all Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

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

Mary Catherine Bateson
Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

Mary Catherine Bateson
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas, enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations.

Mary Catherine Bateson
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.

Mary Catherine Bateson
In many ways, constancy is an illusion... 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
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
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