Havelock Ellis Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 the pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.

The mother is the child's supreme parent.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.

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.

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

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.

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

The absence of a flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.

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.

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

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

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.