Havelock Ellis Quotes

The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.

To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.

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

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

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

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.

The absence of a flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

Every society has the criminals that it deserves.

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.

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

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

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

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

To make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

Beauty is the child of love.

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

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

The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.

The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.

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.

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

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

The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship.

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

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

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

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

One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.

There is nothing more fragile than civilization.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities.

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.

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

Heroes exterminate each other for the benefit of people who are not heroes.

The mother is the child's supreme parent.

No faith is our own that we have not arduously won.

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

Where there is most labour there is not always most life.

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

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.

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

The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.

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

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

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.

Man lives by imagination.

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

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

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

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

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

We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.