Quotes By Havelock Ellis

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.

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.

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.

No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.

One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.

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

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

Man lives by imagination.

To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

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

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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