Havelock Ellis Quotes

Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine. ~ A.E. Samaan

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

The spirits of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing waft through the text to lend 'The Third Sex' an air of scientific authority. ~ Stacey D'Erasmo

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

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

The mother is the child's supreme parent. ~ Havelock Ellis

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

The absence of a flaw in beauty is itself a flaw. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

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

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

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. ~ Havelock Ellis

Starting in 1897, Henry Havelock Ellis devoted six volumes to it: his pioneering Studies in the Psychology of Sex, sprinkled with case studies of unexpected explicitness and perversity. One memorable phrase from volume four, Sexual Selection in Man: the contact of a dog's tongue with her mouth alone afterward sufficed to evoke sexual pleasure. ~ Erik Larson

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

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

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

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

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

Both Ruth and Ted visited him together and in separate sessions. ~ Walter Terry

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

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

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

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

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime
and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis. ~ Sigmund Freud

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

In the beat of a heart, the suck of a breath, you are the universe. ~ Normandi Ellis

I want a tattoo over my heart that reads TRY HARDER YOU LAZY PARAMEDIC SHITBAG OR I WILL HAUNT YOUR BEDROOM FOREVER ~ Warren Ellis

And," Price adds, smiling, "if another round of Bellinis comes within a twenty-foot radius of our table we are going to set the maitre d' on fire. So you know, warn him. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

As long as you're consistently working on your craft, your heart is in the right place, and you pair that with being smart on how you present yourself to people, opportunities will appear. ~ Jay Ellis

I'm here not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama! ~ Kerry Washington

Fear never shows up and the party ends early. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this
and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed
and coming face to face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing ... ~ Bret Easton Ellis

I had this dream, see, where I saw the whole world melt. I was standing on La Cienega and from there I could see the whole world and it was melting and it was just so strong and realistic like. And so I thought, Well, if this dream comes true, how can I stop it, you know? How can I change things, you know? So I thought if I, like pierced my ear or something, like alter my physical image, dye my hair, the world wouldn't melt. So I dyed my hair and this pink lasts. I like it. It lasts. I don't feel like the world is gonna melt anymore. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Meet every man as you find him, for we're all made the same under habit, robe or rags. Some better made than others, and some better cared for, but on the same pattern, all. ~ Ellis Peters

Now when I say Sophie Ellis-Bextor I feel that's not really me because that's become this entity from doing the gigs and the shows and the make-up contracts and whatever else. ~ Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

At this point, harking back to the stuff about souls, Andersen bolts on a perplexing Christian salvation message about how the Little Mermaid can earn a soul if she is good for three hundred years, but every time she sees 'a rude, naughty child', she'll get more time in purgatory. Don't be rude or naughty or the mermaids will suffer? Please. Even as a child, I knew this was ridiculous. ~ Samantha Ellis

Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world. ~ Albert Ellis

There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

I've died before. It was boring, so I stood up. ~ Warren Ellis

God's nature is revealed most perfectly in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in the New Testament of the Bible, who was sent by God to reveal the divine nature, summarized in 'God is Love.' ~ George F. R. Ellis

Unless you turn out to be a shining and ballistic genius, then, trust me, if you want to do this then you're going to be spending the next few years doing little else. This is a thing you do at a table with a notebook and a keyboard, and there's no getting away from it. Put in the hours. You don't get to turn off 'being a writer.' ~ Warren Ellis

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A. ~ Rachel Kushner

There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well . And the world must be easy. ~ Albert Ellis

I wasn't acting on passion. I was simply acting. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

I don't know why or when I started falling for you, Alex. But I did. Ever since I almost ran over your motorcycle that first day of school I haven't been able to stop thinking about what it would be like if you and I got together. And that kiss ... God, I swear I never experienced anything like that in my life. It did mean something. If the solar system didn't tilt then, it never will. I know it's crazy because we're so different. And if anything happens between us I don't want people at school to know. Not that you'll agree to have a secret relationship with me, but I at least have to find out if it's possible. I broke up with Colin, who I had a very public relationship with and I'm ready for something private. Private and real. I know I'm babbling like an idiot, but if you don't say something soon or give me a hint of what you're thinking then I'll--"
"Say it again," he says.
"That whole drawn-out speech?" I remember something about a solar system, but I'm too light-headed to recite the entire thing all over again.
He steps closer. "No. The part about you fallin' for me."
My eyes cling to his. "I think about you all the time, Alex. And I really, really want to kiss you again."
The sides of his mouth turn up.
Unable to face him, I look at the ground. "Don't make fun of me." I can take anything but that right about now.
"Don't turn away from me, mamacita. I'd never make fun of you. ~ Simone Elkeles

In every decision there must be some regrets. ~ Ellis Peters

I love getting dressed up. Being a pop star is the most brilliant job for that. A lot of girls love shopping, but they might see the most amazing outfit and think, 'When am I going to wear that?', so it's my duty to exploit the fact I do have events I can wear these things to. ~ Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Actors are smart. They have to feel safe enough to fall and to get back up. My job is to make sure they don't get hurt. ~ Scott Ellis

Whenever you have strong negative feelings because unfortunate things are actually happening to you or you imagine that they might occur, see whether these feelings healthfully follow from your wishes and desires to have better things occur. Or are you creating them by going beyond your preferences and inventing powerful shoulds, oughts, musts, demands, commands, and necessities? If so, you are turning concern and caution into overconcern, severe anxiety, and panic. Observe the real difference in your feelings! ~ Albert Ellis

What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest.
'What do you do?'
'What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?'
'Why not?'
She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.
'Because ... I don't know,' she sighs.
I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better. ~ Warren Ellis

One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment, and self-fulfillment seems to be falling in love with something - your dreams, your image of the future. ~ Ellis Paul Torrance

Too many people I've loved dearly have left this earth. And some I've lost are still here breathing the same air. That grief can be comparable if not worse in its consumption. ~ Aunjanue Ellis

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live. ~ Albert Ellis

I think perhaps people have too limited a view of where they can put books. They believe they have to be in a room specified as 'the library.' I think books can be anywhere in a house. Piles of books in corners do not offend me. Putting books in the dining room is a wonderful idea. My idea of heaven would be to dine, as well as to sleep, surrounded by books.
~Robert A.M. Stern, Architect ~ Estelle Ellis

My neck and shoulders are killing me. Hard to focus on writing about murder, doom, shagging, our hopeless future & other comedy etc etc. ~ Warren Ellis

And therefor, sir,' seyde the Bysshop, 'leve thys opynyon, other ellis I shall curse you with booke, belle and candyll.'

'Do thou thy warste,' seyde Mordred, 'and I defyghe the! ~ Thomas Malory

The audience
the book's actual cast
quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material
surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality
had to be reshaped. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they'll kill themselves laughing. ~ Albert Ellis

People need all the good memories they can keep with them in this world; they're a sort of steering apparatus in a life-boat ... ~ Marah Ellis Ryan