Top 40 Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

2. “The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

5. “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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

7. “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

8. “Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

10. “Part of the task of composing a life is the artist’s need to find a way to take what is simply ugly and, instead of trying to deny it, to use it in the broader design.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

11. “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

12. “In many ways, constancy is an illusion.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

13. “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

14. “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

15. “The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

16. “Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

17. “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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

20. “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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

22. “Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

27. “Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

28. “It is not necessarily ominous that the formal family dinner is declining in many households or becoming limited to special occasions. We might be better off if we could separate food as nourishment and pleasure from food as the currency of care that leaves so many woman laboring long hours to prove affection in that semantic muddle called nurturance.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

32. “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

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. “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

35. “A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

36. “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

37. “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

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

— Mary Catherine Bateson

39. “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

40. “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