Havelock Ellis Quotes

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.

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.

It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

No faith is our own that we have not arduously won.

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

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.

The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship.

The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.

There can be no sexual love without lust; but, on the other hand, until the currents of lust in the organism have been irradiatedas to affect other parts of the psychic organism--at the least the affections and the social feelings--it is not yet sexual love. Lust, the specific sexual impulse, is indeed the primary and essential element in this synthesis, for it alone is adequate to the end of reproduction, not only in animals but in men. But it is not until lust is expanded and irradiated that it develops into the exquisite and enthralling flower of love.

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.

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

...aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion; from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful which are unbeautiful from the point of view of him who is not a lover, and the greater the degree to which the lover is swayed by his passion the greater the extent to which his normal aesthetic standard is liable to be modified.

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

Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet toits god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.

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

We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.

Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.

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.

Man lives by imagination.

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

All arguments are meaningless until we gain personal experience. One must win one's own place in the spiritual world painfully and alone. There is no other way of salvation. The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.

So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.

Sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities.

However well organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.

Liberty is always unfinished business

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

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.

Courtship, properly understood, is the process whereby both the male and the female are brought into that state of sexual tumescence which is a more or less necessary condition for sexual intercourse. The play of courtship cannot, therefore, be considered to be definitely brought to an end by the ceremony of marriage; it may more properly be regarded as the natural preliminary to every act of coitus.

What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.

Einstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted.

Where there is most labour there is not always most life.

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

Heroes exterminate each other for the benefit of people who are not heroes.

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

The mother is the child's supreme parent.

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

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.

Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing.

Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.

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

The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated—of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired.

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

The sexual regions constitute a particularly vulnerable spot, and remain so even in man, and the need for their protection which thus exists conflicts with the prominent display required for sexual allurement. This end is far more effectively attained, with greater advantage and less disadvantage, by concentrating the chief ensigns of sexual attractiveness on the upper and more conspicuous parts of the body. This method is well-nigh universal among animals as well as in man.

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

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.

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