Havelock Ellis Quotes

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.

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

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

The largely objective character of beauty is further indicated by the fact that to a considerable extent beauty is the expression of health. A well and harmoniously developed body, tense muscles, an elastic and finely toned skin, bright eyes, grace and animation of carriage- all these things which are essential to beauty are the conditions of health.

The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother.

The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.

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 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.

The modesty of women, which, in its most primitive form among animals, is based on sexual periodicity, is, with that periodicity, an essential condition of courtship.

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

Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people.

Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that expressthemselves 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. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first.

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

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.

Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.

Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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.

The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.

Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.

There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

Every ist writes his own autobiography.

The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.

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.

A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

Beauty is the child of love.

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.

Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.

Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.

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.

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

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.

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

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.

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.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.

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.

To make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

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.

Philosophy is a purely personal matter. A genuine philosopher's credo is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same philosophy.

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

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.

Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex—with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.