p.4 'reflexivity' is the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa.

p.5 the thesis defended in the present book is that reflexivity is the means by which we make our way through the world.

p.6-7 Being an 'active agent' hinges on the fact that individuals develop and define their ultimate concerns: those internal goods that they care about most, the precise constellation of which makes for their concrete singularity as persons. No one can have an ultimate concern and fail to do something about it. Instead, each person seeks to develop a concrete course of action to realise that concern by elaborating a 'project', in the (fallible) belief that to accomplish this project is to realise one's concern. Action itself thus depends upon the existence of what are termed 'projects', where a project stands for any course of action intentionally engaged upon by a human being. Thus, the answer to why we act at all is in order to promote our concerns; we form 'projects' to advance or protect what we care about most.

p.7 Human beings are distinctive... because of their reflexive ability to design (and redesign) many of the projects they pursue. If we are to survive and thrive, we have to be practitioners, and the definition of a successful practice is the realisation of a particular project in the relevant part of the environment.

p.9 in the practical world... projects... cannot become skilful practices unless and until we learn how to interact with the causal powers of the objects in question, powers which are usually termed affordances and resistances... Successful practice depends upon accommodating ourselves to such affordances and resistances

p.20 Deliberation is concerned with exploring the implications of endorsing a particular cluster of concerns from those pre-selected as desirable to the subject during the first moment... This phase of the inner dialog ranges from the one extreme of discarding projects, through comparing the worth of contesting concerns, to the opposite pole of preliminary determination. Deliberation produces a very provisional ranking of the concerns with which a subject feels that she should and can live. Often, this phase of the process entails a visual projection of scenarios seeking to capture, as best the subject is able, the modus vivendi that would be involved, whilst listening to the emotional commentary that is provoked and evoked when imagining that particular way of life. Such musings are still inconclusive, but as Peirce insisted: 'every man who does accomplish great things is given to building elaborate castles in the air'.

p.22 1.That our unique personal identities, which derive from our singular constellation of concerns, mean that we are radically heterogeneous as subjects... 2. That our subjectivity is dynamic... we modify our own goals in terms of their contextual feasibility, as we see it... 3. That, for the most part, we are active rather than passive subjects because we adjust our projects to those practices that we believe we can realise... Unless these points are taken on board, our way through the world is not a path that we ourselves help to chart and the various trajectories that we describe remain without explanation.

p.64 internal conversation possesses causal efficacy

p.64 In everyday terms, what would we lack if we did not possess this property [internal conversation] and exercise it as a power? Tomlinson's response is that without 'an effective inner voice, it is very difficult to initiate ideas, develop thought, be creative, and respond intelligently to discourse, plan, control our feelings, solve problems, or develop self-esteem'.

p.64 internal conversation is not 'idle'; one of its most important causal powers is reflexively to conceive and to conduct those courses of action by which we navigate our way through the social world.

p.65 In short, our internal conversations are seen as crucial to how we make our way through the world today. They are so because they account for our being 'active agents', people who make things happen, not 'passive agents' to whom things happen.

p.87 As Wiley concisely puts it, 'inner speech does have a job to do, it has to steer us through the world'.

p.87 The goal of defining and ordering our concerns, through what is effectively a life-long internal conversation, is to arrive at a satisfying and sustainable modus vivendi. Through prioritisation, conducted by means of inner dialogue, '[i]t is these acts of ordering and rejection - integration and separation - that create a self out of the raw materials of inner life'... in dedicating oneself to a cluster of concerns, one takes responsibility for them and makes them one's own.

p.88 Any subject who arrives at this position, be it in preliminary form... or as the result of a series of revisions... has then to confront the second generic question and decide 'How do I go about it?' In other words, what course(s) of action should this subject adopt in order for the concerns she cares about most to be realised in an appropriate modus vivendi? Elsewhere, I have discussed this as a matter of completing the sequence

<Concerns → Projects → Practices>

p.90 Once self-consciousness has emerged, we each engage in active interplay with all orders of reality, including the social. This interaction cannot but be reflexive, because survival depends upon exercising powers of reflexivity - particularly those of self-monitoring. But our thriving entails the use of a larger array of these social powers, especially reflexive self-evaluation and self regulation, which inform us of what to seek and to shun in the outer world, including the social domain.

p.90 All normal people are reflexive and the exercise of reflexivity is essential to their normality.

p.97 If reflexivity is indeed a personal emergent property, it will operate as a generative mechanism whose causal consequences are both internal and external. Internal effects arise for the subject because anyone who tries to make his or her own way through the world is also attempting to regulate the relationship between the personal and the social in conformity with their concerns. Obviously, it is easier to change oneself than to change society. Hence, in the attempt to align the self and the social, more effort is put into self-monitoring than into seeking social transformation.

 The internal causal efficacy of reflexivity derives directly from the fact that reasons are causes. When a subject converts her life 'concerns' into practical 'projects', she has found good reason for giving her conscious assent to their pursuit because she has (fallibly) examined herself, surveyed the social contexts accessible to her and decided upon a feasible combination. She commits herself to her project in the belief that she can realise her definition of the good life (or at least an approximation to it) in a particular kind of social context, providing she works at it. The work involved is mainly self-work, entailing very different forms of self-monitoring

p.155 What is 'ultimate' about an 'ultimate concern' is that it is architechtonic: it forms the organising principle around which all else should be integrated.

p.231 The question that most interviewees (of all kinds) find hardest to answer concerns the origins of their values.

p.300 It has already been stressed that a major difference between these two sub-groups is that for autonomous reflexives internal conversation is task-oriented whilst for meta-reflexives it is value-oriented.