Havelock Ellis Quotes

It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

Beauty is the child of love.

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.

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.

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

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.

To make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

Man lives by imagination.

We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.

No faith is our own that we have not arduously won.

The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother.

The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.

The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship.

Every ist writes his own autobiography.

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

Where there is most labour there is not always most life.

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

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.

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.

The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.

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

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

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

There is nothing more fragile than civilization.

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

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

The mother is the child's supreme parent.

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

Every society has the criminals that it deserves.

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.

The sun moon and stars would have disappeared long ago had they been within the reach of predatory human hands.

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions toward us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

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.

Jealousy that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.

In philosophy it is not the attainment of the goal that matters it is the things that are met with by the way.

What we call progress is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance.

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

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

The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.