Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

30 quotes in 499 categories

• The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
• There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.
• 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…
• Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by…
• Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
• 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…
• In many ways, constancy is an illusion.
• In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants…
• 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…
• Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.
• 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…
• What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
• The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.
• We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the…
• The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
• ... as we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may…
• 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…
• Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one…
• Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
• The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

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