Havelock Ellis Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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

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.

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

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

Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people.

Liberty is always unfinished business

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.