Havelock Ellis's Quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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.

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

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

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

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.

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

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

The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation that make it enjoyable.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

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

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

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 a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.

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

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

And the only thing to do with a sin is to confess, do penance and then, after some kind of decent interval, ask for forgiveness.

Even in the best of lives, mistakes are made.

I believe I am an honorable man.

I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's.

It is as if Clinton had called one of the most respected character witnesses in all of U.S. history to testify that the primal urge has a most distinguished presidential pedigree.

To my three sons, Peter, Scott, and Alexander who pulled me from the 18th Century and back into the present on a regular basis and therefore made me a better person, thank you. And to my wife, who sits at the table there. Who is right about almost everything.