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

Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

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

The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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 effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, which allows us to grow.

— Mary Catherine Bateson

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

— 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

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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

— 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

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

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

— 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
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