Havelock Ellis Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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 romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.

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

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.

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

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

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.

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

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

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

'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.

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

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.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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