Havelock Ellis famous quotes

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

#Life #Moving On #Letting Go

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

#Mother #Children #Parent

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

#Life #Art #Teach

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Mother #Father #Parent

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Religious #Jesus #Careers

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

#Peace #War #Anti War

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

#Love #Life #Pain

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

#Beauty #Beautiful #Design

However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Courage #Bravery #Risk

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

#Work #Lying #Land

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

#Educational #Preparation #Needs

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

#Atheism #Politics #Morality

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

#Time #Volcanoes #Civilization

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

#Men #Doors #Fool

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

#Sex #Lying #Roots

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

#Struggle #Essence #Together

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

#Suicide #War #Fighting

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

#Positive #Business #Failure

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Best Love #Hate #Love Is

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

#Stars #Moon #Space

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

#Life #Beautiful #Dance

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Depression #Optimism #Psychology

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

#Suicide #Suicidal #Mean

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

#Men #Atheism #Dignity

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

#Money #Thinking #Poetry

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

#Change #Progress #Nuisance

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

#Inspiring #Dream #Real

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

#Opportunity #Society #Heroism

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Writing #Littles #Reason

Beauty is the child of love.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Beauty #Children #Love Is

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Mean #Men #Charm

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

#Change #Past #Self

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

#People #Politics #Action

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

#Country #War #Successful

Liberty is always unfinished business
-- Havelock Ellis

#Liberty #Unfinished

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

#Art #Lying #Men

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

#Sometimes #Valuable

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

#Sex #Race #Adoption

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

#Hero #People #Benefits

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

#Artist #Imagination #Statistics

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

#Religion #Devil

To make a mountain out of a mole-hill.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Mountain #Moles #Hills

Man lives by imagination.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Men #Imagination #Live By

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Artist #Imagination #Spheres

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Art #Attitude #Golf

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

#Love #Flower #Men

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

#Marriage #Sex #Play

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

#Sex #Fundamentals #Function

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Sex #Lying #Roots

There is nothing more fragile than civilization.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Civilization

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

#Men #Alcohol #Syphilis

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

#May #Finest #Pleasure

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Sex #Animal #Essentials

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

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Philosophy #Two #Personality

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

#Character #Eye #Expression

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

#Giving #Worthy

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Civilization #Alcohol #Poison

Where there is most labour there is not always most life.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Work #Labour

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

#Soul #Style #Mystic

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

#Beautiful #Lying #Past

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Running #Art #Latin

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

#Independent #Thinking #Opportunity

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

#Philosophy #Goal #Matter

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

#Men #Technology #Civilization

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

#Real #Responsibility #Needs

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

#Intimate #Embrace

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Men #Emotion #Kind

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

#Men #Tragedy #Different

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

#Birth Control #Birth #Social

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

#Wise #Country #Time

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

#Science #Math #Ladders

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

#Population #Tasks #Decrease

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

#Religion #Atheism #Connections

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

#Inspirational #Men #Belief

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.
-- Havelock Ellis

#Husband #Home #Average

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

#Children #Parent #Should

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

#Faith #Sublime #Cherish

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

#Prayer #Romantic Love #Romance

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

#Men #Foundation #Youth