Quote

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.

Havelock Ellis

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Havelock Ellis
Age: 80 †
Born: 1859
Born: February 2
Died: 1939
Died: July 8
Physician
Psychologist
Writer
Henry Havelock Ellis
H. Havelock Ellis
Cannot
Told
Dispense
Give
Name
Investigators
Must
Least
Categories
Giving
Names
Labels
Children
Pleasure
Receive
Thoroughgoing
Even
Language
Scientific
Positivist
Thing
Use
Fiction
Investigator
Make
Science
Already
Fictions

More quotes by Havelock Ellis

Image
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.
Havelock Ellis
Image
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
Havelock Ellis
Image
It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.
Havelock Ellis
Image
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
Havelock Ellis
Image
Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
Havelock Ellis
Image
If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth.
Havelock Ellis
Image
There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.
Havelock Ellis
Image
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
Image
Beauty is the child of love.
Havelock Ellis
Image
There is nothing more fragile than civilization.
Havelock Ellis
Image
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
Image
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
Havelock Ellis
Image
Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.
Havelock Ellis
Image
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
Havelock Ellis
Image
Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.
Havelock Ellis
Image
Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.
Havelock Ellis
Image
Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
Havelock Ellis
Image
Where there is most labour there is not always most life.
Havelock Ellis
Image
Failing to find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all.
Havelock Ellis
Image
The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.
Havelock Ellis