Quotes from Havelock Ellis

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

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

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 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.

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

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

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

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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

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.

There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.

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

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?

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.

Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.

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

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.

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.

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.

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