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Quotes by Henry Ellis


All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
– Henry Ellis
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
– Henry Ellis
A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
– Henry Ellis
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
– Henry Ellis
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.
– Henry 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.
– Henry Ellis
Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
– Henry Ellis
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.
– Henry Ellis
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
– Henry Ellis
Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.
– Henry Ellis
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
– Henry Ellis
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.
– Henry Ellis
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.
– Henry Ellis
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
– Henry 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.
– Henry Ellis
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.
– Henry Ellis
It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.
– Henry Ellis
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.
– Henry Ellis
Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
– Henry Ellis
Man lives by imagination.
– Henry Ellis
Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
– Henry Ellis
One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.
– Henry Ellis
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
– Henry Ellis
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
– Henry Ellis
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
– Henry 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.
– Henry Ellis
The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product.
– Henry Ellis
The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. . . . A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.
– Henry Ellis
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
– Henry Ellis
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
– Henry Ellis
The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.
– Henry Ellis
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
– Henry 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.
– Henry Ellis
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
– Henry Ellis
The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
– Henry 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.
– Henry Ellis
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.
– Henry Ellis
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.
– Henry Ellis
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
– Henry Ellis
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
– Henry Ellis
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
– Henry Ellis
To make a mountain of a mole-hill.
– Henry 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.
– Henry Ellis
What we call morals is simply blind obedience to words of command.
– Henry Ellis
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
– Henry Ellis