We have all been brought up with an ethical system of 2,000 years ago, an industrial-managerial system of 200-300 years ago, a statecraft system of 200 years ago, and so on. None of this is working very well for the requirements of a time as complex and variegated as our own. So we stand shuttering at the threshold, with no clear map.

The more you love, the more loving you become. That's just the way it works. It is a generosity of spirit.

Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing.

I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.

If you travel as much as I do - 165,000 miles last year - you exist nowhere. You're always between heaven and earth, you're always arriving in a new place, you're always starting from the beginning - talk about origins - and you don't know quite what's going to unfold. You live in the unexpected and the inexplicable all the time.

Women are rising slowly but steadily into full partnership with men all over the world. This is going to change everything. When the rich mind- style of women is available - with an emphasis on process, rather than on end-product, and on making things cohere, grow and interlink - - then it changes the way we educate, it changes the way we govern, it changes the way we worship.

If you keep telling the same sad small story. You will keep living the same sad small life.