Havelock Ellis Quotes

82 Sourced 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.

Havelock Ellis
The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.

Havelock Ellis
What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.

Havelock Ellis
'Auto erotism,'..spontaneous solitary sexual phenomena of which genital excitement during sleep may be said to be the type.

Havelock Ellis
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.

Havelock Ellis
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.

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
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 the pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.

Havelock Ellis
Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.

Havelock Ellis
It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.

Havelock Ellis
For the artist life is always a discipline, and no discipline can be without pain.

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

Havelock Ellis
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.

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

Havelock Ellis
"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.

Havelock Ellis
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.

Havelock Ellis
The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities... A life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.

Havelock Ellis
The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing. As usual, what we call 'progress' is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

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

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 art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves 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.

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

Havelock Ellis