Havelock Ellis Quotes
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.
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.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
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.
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.
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.
However well organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
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.
Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way
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.
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.
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
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.
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.
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
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.
Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
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.
So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.
The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.
The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation that make it enjoyable.
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.
The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.