Havelock Ellis - The dance of life (1923)

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The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

Havelock Ellis
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

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

Havelock Ellis
If mathematics were the only path of science.... Nature would have been illegible for Goethe..

Havelock Ellis
We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.

Havelock Ellis
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.

Havelock Ellis
Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people.

Havelock Ellis
For even the most sober 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.

Havelock Ellis
It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

Havelock Ellis
Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

Havelock Ellis
The methods of statistics are so variable and uncertain, so apt to be influenced by circumstances, that it is never possible to be sure that one is operating with figures of equal weight.

Havelock Ellis
The sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

Havelock Ellis
It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Havelock Ellis
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.

Havelock Ellis
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with along the way.

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

Havelock Ellis
To learn to dance is the most austere of disciplines.

Havelock Ellis
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.

Havelock Ellis
For the artist life is always a discipline, and no discipline can be without pain.

Havelock Ellis
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

Havelock Ellis
What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.

Havelock Ellis
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.

Havelock Ellis
Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

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

Havelock Ellis
The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

Havelock Ellis