Havelock Ellis - Collected Quotes

"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, "The Dance of Life", 1923)

"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 Dance of Life", 1923)

"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 Dance of Life", 1923)

"It is not surprising that the greatest mathematicians have again and again appealed to the arts in order to find some analogy to their own work. They have indeed found it in the most varied arts, in poetry, in painting, and in sculpture, although it would certainly seem that it is in music, the most abstract of all the arts, the art of number and of time, that we find the closest analogy." (Havelock Ellis, "The Dance of Life", 1923)

"The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought." (Havelock Ellis, "The Dance of Life", 1923)

"[…] 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 Dance of Life", 1923)

"Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life." (Havelock Ellis)