Havelock Ellis Quotes

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

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.

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.

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

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.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

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.

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.

Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.

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 have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.

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.

Einstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted.

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

However well organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.

What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.

No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.

Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.

Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

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.

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

Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.

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.

The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing.

Liberty is always unfinished business

There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.

The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.

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 greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.

In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.

A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

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.

I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex—with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated—of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired.

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.

It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.