Havelock Ellis Quotes - Page 4

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship.

Where there is most labour there is not always most life.

The modesty of women, which, in its most primitive form among animals, is based on sexual periodicity, is, with that periodicity, an essential condition of courtship.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.

There is nothing more fragile than civilization.

Heroes exterminate each other for the benefit of people who are not heroes.

The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.

The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation that make it enjoyable.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.

The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.

The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

To make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.

I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.

The largely objective character of beauty is further indicated by the fact that to a considerable extent beauty is the expression of health. A well and harmoniously developed body, tense muscles, an elastic and finely toned skin, bright eyes, grace and animation of carriage- all these things which are essential to beauty are the conditions of health.

Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing.

The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.