Famous Quotes

Quotes by 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.
• A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
• All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
• Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of 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.
• Every artist writes his own autobiography.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.
• Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
• Man lives by imagination.
• Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
• Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
• The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
• 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.
• 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 a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.
• There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
• 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.