The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
Henry Havelock Ellis
- More quotations by Psychologist
Henry Havelock Ellis quotes
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
"Charm" - which means the power to effect work without employing brute force - is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.
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.
Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
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.
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.
It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.
It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.
Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
Man lives by imagination.
Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
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.
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.
What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
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