Quotes By Havelock Ellis

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.