“To believe that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is to give them a sort of psychic power over you they do not have...we really do generate our own feelings. No one else can do it for us. We respond and are responsible. To think other people are responsible for our feelings is to inhabit a billiard ball, inanimate universe.”

“Once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about...But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about. This is a key question of balance.”

“We all have beliefs and expectations from our personal experience; it is impossible to live without them. Since we have to make some assumptions, they might as well be ones that allow us freedom, choice and fun in the world, rather than ones that limit us. You often get what you expect to get.”

“Any single person's viewpoint will have blind spots caused by their habitual ways of perceiving the world, their perceptual filters...How can we shift our perceptions to get outside our own limited world view?”

“True learning involves learning other ways of doing what you can do already.”

“What happens to our thoughts as we clothe them in language, and how faithfully are they preserved when our listeners undress them?”

“Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.”