Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

As I grew up I was fervently desirous of becoming acquainted with Nature.

I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you're doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

I think it was this curiosity about the natural world which awoke my early interest in science.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

I dug things up. I was curious. I liked to draw what I found.

Sometimes random things that you wouldn't think mean anything mean so much to them. With kids, you can say, 'Let's go pick some flowers' or 'There's a snail. Let's investigate that.'

I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things.

I have two children and it's amazing how in tune they are with nature, with light, with smells, with time.

Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children.

Every day, I get e-mails from kids who want a tree - a world away from the adult world.

It's sad that children don't spend enough time looking around and being amazed by what's in the real world.

Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.

And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

The dugout in the weeds or leaves beneath a backyard willow, the rivulet of a seasonal creek, even the ditch between the front yard and the road-all of these places are entire universes to a young child.

Kids are curious.Kids are watching ants while adults are stepping on them.

The happiness even of the naturalist depends in some measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each bright particular with his eyes.

When I was a kid my parents used to tell me, "Emo, don't go near the cellar door!" One day when they were away, I went up to the cellar door. And I pushed it and walked through and saw strange, wonderful things, things I had never seen before, like... trees. Grass. Flowers. The sun... that was nice... the sun.

I always look outside.

There is a real world, beyond the glass, for children who look, for those whose parents encourage them to truly see.

One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.

Only the children know what they are looking for.