At midlife, you're pregnant with the best self you can be - someone who has learned enough from both successes and failures to add up to a fine human being.

Once you get to your forties or fifties in this society, very few people haven't had at least one body blow - financial, bankruptcy, divorce, relationship disaster, addiction, trouble with a child, trouble with a parent. Most people take some blow.

The power to rethink a situation is our greatest tool for transforming the world. This notion is taking hold in medicine, in business, in education. But not in politics and the media. They are the last holdouts of old-paradigm thinking.

You can learn a lesson the first time, when it's presented in a package that is joyous - or at least palatable. But if you don't learn the lesson the first time, then there will be a second time and a third time. And each time it will just get harder and harder.

Capitalism has been really good to me. I'm very fortunate: I have written books and my books have sold.

When you look at obesity in the United States, clearly it is not a bunch of stupid people. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Sometimes people who are dealing with issues of obesity and compulsive eating know more than I will ever know about nutrition, metabolism, and exercise, because they have studied it. But clearly the real problem, and therefore the real solution, is on another level of consciousness, and that is where the spiritual work comes in.

The power of nonviolence is not circumstance-specific. It is as applicable to the problems that confront us now, as to problems that confronted generations in the past. It is not a medicine or a solution so much as a healing process. It is the active spiritual immune system of humanity.