Quotes from Havelock Ellis

Man lives by imagination.

I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.

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

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

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

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

The place where optimism flourishes most is in the lunatic asylum.

The place where optimism flourishes the most is the lunatic asylum.

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

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

There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

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

What we call 'Progress' is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

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

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

The absence of a flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

Every society has the criminals that it deserves.

Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on the pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.

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

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

When love is suppressed hate takes its place.

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.

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

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