Quotes from Havelock Ellis

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.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

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

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

"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.

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

The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.