Quotes By Havelock Ellis

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Man lives by imagination.

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.

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

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.