136 Quotes by Havelock Ellis

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

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.

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

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

Beauty is the child of love.

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.

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

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.