Havelock Ellis Quotes

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

Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

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

There is nothing more fragile than civilization.

It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.

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

All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.

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.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

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.