Power is a central issue in social and personal transformation. Our sources and uses of power set our boundaries, give form to our relationships, even determine how much we let ourselves liberate and express aspects of the self. More than party registration, more than our purported philosophy or ideology, personal power defines our politics.

The beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We have only to pay attention to the flow of attention itself.

A fully functioning employee with a healthy self-image is money in the bank.

Uncertainty is the necessary companion of all explorers.

We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically.

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by agreement or by emotional appeal.

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing. We have not fully recognized this process of leaping ahead, however, in part because textbooks tend to tame revolutions...They describe the advances as if they had been logical in their day, not all shocking.