“Why' questions have little value, at best they get justifications or long explanations which do nothing to change the situation.”

“Questions are also interventions. A good question can take a person's mind in a completely new direction and change his life. For example, ask yourself frequently, 'What is the most useful question to ask now?”

“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.”

“I'm only a housewife, I'm afraid." How often do we hear this shocking admission. I'm afraid when I hear it I feel very angry indeed. Only a housewife: only a practitioner of one of the two most noble professions (the other one is that of a farmer); only the mistress of a huge battery of high and varied skills and custodian of civilization itself. Only a typist, perhaps! Only a company director, or a nuclear physicist; only a barrister; only the President! When a woman says she is a housewife she should say it with the utmost pride, for there is nothing higher on this planet to which she could aspire.”

“Words are anchors for sense experience, but the experience is not the reality, and the word is not the experience. Language is thus two removes from reality. To argue about the real meaning of a word is rather like arguing that one menu tastes better than another because you prefer the food that is printed on it...To come to believe that the external world is patterned by the way we talk about it is even worse than eating the menu - it is eating the printing ink on the menu. Words can be combined and manipulated in ways that have nothing to do with sensory experience.”

“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?”