Havelock Ellis Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.