Quotes from 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.

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

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

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Self-care should include the cold shower as well as the scented tub.

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

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.

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]

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.

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?

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.

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]

We never promised we would stay the same,/But only we would shape our change/From this now single clay. [p. 82]

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.