Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

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

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

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.

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

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 pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

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.

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

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 in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. 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.

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

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.

Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

... 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.

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

Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.

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

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

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

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

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

When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children.

...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.

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]

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.

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