Havelock Ellis – 29 Quotes

29 Quotes by Havelock Ellis

Man lives by imagination.

– Havelock Ellis

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

– Havelock Ellis

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

– Havelock Ellis

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

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

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

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

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.

– Havelock Ellis

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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