Words matter. These are the best Havelock Ellis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.
One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.
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.
A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
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.
There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.
No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.
Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
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.
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.
Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
When love is suppressed hate takes its place.
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.
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.
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
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.
Man lives by imagination.
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.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
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.
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.
The husband – by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition – regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
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 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.
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.
It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.
