Quotes from Havelock Ellis

Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.

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

Philosophy is a purely personal matter. A genuine philosopher's credo is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same philosophy.

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

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.

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

Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.

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.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

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 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.

The greatest task before civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common destruction.

We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.

"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.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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.

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

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is not mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met along the way

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