Quotes By Havelock Ellis

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

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

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

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

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.