Quotes from Havelock Ellis

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

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

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.

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.

Man lives by imagination.

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

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

The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.

Beauty is the child of love.

Krafft-Ebing was disposed to regard all cases in which a scatalogical sexual attraction existed as due to latent masochism.

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.

The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.

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.

No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

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.

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

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.

To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.