Quotes By Havelock Ellis

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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

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.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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

Man lives by imagination.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.