The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.

Admit at least one painful truth to yourself every day. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not immeasurably superior to all your friends. Exercises of this sort, prolonged through several years, will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.

If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who best promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time.

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.

Among the Tibetans, one wife has many husbands, because men are too poor to support a whole wife.

Belief systems provide a programme which relieves the necessity of thought.