Quotes By Havelock Ellis

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

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

'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.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.

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.

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

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

However well organized 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.

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