107+ Havelock Ellis Quotes On Slavery, Education And Sexuality

Havelock Ellis was a British Psychologist who was a pioneer in the study of human sexuality. He was also a prominent sociologist, physician, and writer. He wrote extensively on a variety of topics, including the psychology of sex, marriage, gender, and education. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Havelock Ellis on life, love, slavery.

Top 10 Havelock Ellis Quotes

1. All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
2. 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.
3. Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
4. All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
5. 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.
6. Pain and death are a part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
7. 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.
8. There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
9. The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
10. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

Havelock Ellis Short Quotes

• Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.
• Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
• The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
• A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
• Every artist writes his own autobiography.
• What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.
• Liberty is always unfinished business
• The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
• The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
• What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

Havelock Ellis Quotes About Life

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

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

The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated—of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired. — 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

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

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

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

Where there is most labour there is not always most life. — Havelock Ellis

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach. — Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis Quotes About Sexuality

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

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

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

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

The modesty of women, which, in its most primitive form among animals, is based on sexual periodicity, is, with that periodicity, an essential condition of courtship. — Havelock Ellis

Sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities. — Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis Quotes About Civilization

Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible. — Havelock Ellis

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

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

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. — Havelock Ellis

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization. — Havelock Ellis

There is nothing more fragile than civilization. — Havelock Ellis

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

Havelock Ellis Quotes About Social

Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments. — Havelock Ellis

Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people. — Havelock Ellis

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

Havelock Ellis Famous Quotes And Sayings

It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution. — Havelock Ellis

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

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

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

Philosophy is a purely personal matter. A genuine philosopher's credo is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same philosophy. — Havelock Ellis

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

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

So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces. — 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

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

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

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

The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together. — Havelock Ellis

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

To make a mountain out of a mole-hill. — 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

Man lives by imagination. — Havelock Ellis

The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product. — Havelock Ellis

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

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

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

The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother. — Havelock Ellis

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

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul. — Havelock Ellis

The mother is the child's supreme parent. — Havelock Ellis

I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex—with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex. — Havelock Ellis

The largely objective character of beauty is further indicated by the fact that to a considerable extent beauty is the expression of health. A well and harmoniously developed body, tense muscles, an elastic and finely toned skin, bright eyes, grace and animation of carriage- all these things which are essential to beauty are the conditions of health. — Havelock Ellis

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken. — Havelock Ellis

The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling. — 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

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

All arguments are meaningless until we gain personal experience. One must win one's own place in the spiritual world painfully and alone. There is no other way of salvation. The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness. — Havelock Ellis

The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations. — Havelock Ellis

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

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

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else. — Havelock Ellis

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities. — Havelock Ellis

A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God. — Havelock Ellis

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

Courtship, properly understood, is the process whereby both the male and the female are brought into that state of sexual tumescence which is a more or less necessary condition for sexual intercourse. The play of courtship cannot, therefore, be considered to be definitely brought to an end by the ceremony of marriage; it may more properly be regarded as the natural preliminary to every act of coitus. — 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

Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life? — Havelock Ellis

Beauty is the child of love. — Havelock Ellis

We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves. — Havelock Ellis

Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide. — Havelock Ellis

Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination. — Havelock Ellis

...aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion; from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful which are unbeautiful from the point of view of him who is not a lover, and the greater the degree to which the lover is swayed by his passion the greater the extent to which his normal aesthetic standard is liable to be modified. — Havelock Ellis

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience. — Havelock Ellis

The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship. — Havelock Ellis

It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination. — Havelock Ellis

All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead. — Havelock Ellis

Einstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted. — Havelock Ellis

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

Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet toits god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought. — Havelock Ellis

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 a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum. — Havelock Ellis

Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing. — 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

Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction. — Havelock Ellis

Life Lessons by Havelock Ellis

1. Havelock Ellis taught that we should strive to be open-minded and accept the differences in others, as well as ourselves. He believed that it was important to be tolerant of other people's beliefs and opinions, and to be willing to learn from them.
2. He also emphasized the importance of self-awareness and understanding our own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. He believed that understanding our emotions can help us to better understand others and foster more meaningful relationships.
3. Finally, he encouraged the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and believed that education was the key to unlocking our potential and achieving our goals.