Top 51 Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes
#1. 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
#2. After all, most of us have lived lives based on commitments made without any way of knowing where they would lead. The uncertainty is an essential element in commitment, the acceptance of consequences an essential element in fidelity. [p. 80]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. For some of us, "chauvinism" is simply a shortening of "male chauvinism." For others, it is a reminder of the dangers of devotion to the superiority of any group, gender, race, religion, or nation, or even to the truths of any era.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#6. As people grow older, some of the ways they have contributed in the past may no longer be possible, but the challenge to society is not only to provide help and care where these are needed but also to offer the opportunity to contribute and care for others [p. 8]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#9. No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a really nice man who wishes she were not.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#10. Active wisdom
an entire cohort with something new to offer to the world as years of experience combined with continuing health. [p. 52]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#12. Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#13. We never promised we would stay the same,/But only we would shape our change/From this now single clay.[p. 82]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#14. 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
#16. 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
#17. A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#18. 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 side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#20. What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#22. It's all about being in control of myself as an older woman who lives alone, and it's all about how I am going to do what I have to do to be as strong as I can be and be confident that I can do what I need to do as an older person. [p. 62]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#23. Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#24. 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. [p. 199]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#25. So this little boy was
I became her confidant a little too early, I think. It didn't seem to warp me exactly, but it left me with a little too much knowledge at an early age. [p. 143]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#27. 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. [p. 88]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#28. 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. [p. 38]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#29. Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#31. 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
#32. When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return ...
Mary Catherine Bateson
#33. The caretaking has to be done. "Somebody's got to be the mommy." Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#34. Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities. [p. 38]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#39. The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#40. 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
#41. There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#43. Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#44. Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#45. Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stage takes shape. [p. 31]
Mary Catherine Bateson
#47. 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
#48. 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.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#49. 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.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#50. I had repeatedly accepted inappropriate burdens, stepping in to do what needed to be done. In retrospect, I think I carried them well, but the cost was that I was chronically overloaded, weary, and short of time for politicking, smoothing ruffled feathers, and simply resting.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#51. If you compare statistics on different types of households, you find that the presence of an adult male means more additional work for the woman than the presence of a child under ten, even when the man believes himself to be sharing the housework equally.*
Mary Catherine Bateson
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