Quotes from Havelock Ellis

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

Heroes exterminate each other for the benefit of people who are not heroes.

the place where optism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

the female is most easily won by the male who most strongly excites her sexual instincts.

A woman may not want a lover, but may yet want a child.

Steinach found that, when sexually mature white rats were castrated, though at first they remained as potent as ever, their potency gradually declined; sexual excitement, however, and sexual inclination always persisted.

Luther, again, always compared the sexual to the excretory impulse, and said that marriage was just as necessary as the emission of urine.

That sexual feelings exist [it would be better to say 'may exist'] from earliest infancy is well known, and therefore this function does not depend upon puberty, though intensified by it.

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

For dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life: it is life itself.

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 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.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.

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.

The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.

Where there is most labour there is not always most life.

Every ist writes his own autobiography.

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

Liberty is always unfinished business

No faith is our own that we have not arduously won.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

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

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.

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.