Havelock Ellis's Quotes

Henry Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 – 8 July 1939) was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He is credited^{[by whom?]} with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.

Havelock Ellis's selected quotes:

Havelock Ellis about Great:

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to ...
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Havelock Ellis about Work:

The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute ...
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Havelock Ellis about Money:

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it ...
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Havelock Ellis about Life:

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until ...
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Havelock Ellis about Life:

The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's ...
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Henry Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 – 8 July 1939) was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and next published works upon a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as without difficulty as upon transgender psychology. He is credited^{[by whom?]} with introducing the notions of arrogance and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.

Ellis was among the pioneering investigators of psychedelic drugs and the author of one of the first written reports to the public nearly an experience subsequently mescaline, which he conducted on himself in 1896. He supported eugenics and served as one of 16 Vice-Presidents of the Eugenics Society from 1909 to 1912.

All quotes from Havelock Ellis sorted alphabetically:

Havelock Ellis about Time:

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

Havelock Ellis about Faith:

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

Havelock Ellis about Man:

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

Havelock Ellis about Day:

At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Work:

'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.

Havelock Ellis about Life:

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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

Havelock Ellis about Women:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Man:

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

Havelock Ellis about Art:

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Havelock Ellis about Happiness:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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

Havelock Ellis about Education:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Goal:

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

Havelock Ellis about Nature:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Knowledge:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Romantic:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Imagination:

Man lives by imagination.

Havelock Ellis about Love:

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

Havelock Ellis about Great:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Embrace:

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

Havelock Ellis about Wisdom:

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

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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

Havelock Ellis about Giving:

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

Havelock Ellis about Woman:

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

Havelock Ellis about Beauty:

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

Havelock Ellis about Life:

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

Havelock Ellis about Sometimes:

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

Havelock Ellis about Work:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Art:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Greatest:

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

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Rise:

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

Havelock Ellis about Thought:

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

Havelock Ellis about Love:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Life:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Optimism:

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

Havelock Ellis about Children:

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

Havelock Ellis about Music:

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

Havelock Ellis about Land:

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

Havelock Ellis about Suicide:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Wise:

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.

Havelock Ellis about Nature:

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

Havelock Ellis about Leader:

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

Havelock Ellis about Money:

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

Havelock Ellis about War:

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

Havelock Ellis about Change:

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

Havelock Ellis about Words:

What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.