Havelock Ellis Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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

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
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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
It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

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

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

Havelock Ellis
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.

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

Havelock Ellis
'Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.

Havelock Ellis
I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Havelock Ellis
I am regarded as an authority on sex, a fact which sometimes amused one or two (though not all) of my intimate women friends.

Havelock Ellis
The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.

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

Havelock Ellis