Havelock Ellis Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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

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

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
If mathematics were the only path of science.... Nature would have been illegible for Goethe..

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

Havelock Ellis
Aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion; from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful which are unbeautiful from the point of view of him who is not a lover, and the greater the degree to which the lover is swayed by his passion the greater the extent to which his normal aesthetic standard is liable to be modified.

Havelock Ellis
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.

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

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

Havelock Ellis
At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.

Havelock Ellis
The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women.

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

Havelock Ellis
We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

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

Havelock Ellis
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.

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

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

Havelock Ellis
To learn to dance is the most austere of disciplines.

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

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