Havelock Ellis quotes

Havelock Ellis was an English physician, psychologist, and social reformer, known for his pioneering studies in human sexuality. His groundbreaking works contributed significantly to the understanding of sexual behavior and social attitudes in the modern era. He played a major role in challenging taboos around sexuality and advocating for sexual education and rights. Here are 70 of his quotes:

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

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 place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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 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

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

Havelock Ellis

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

Havelock Ellis

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

Havelock Ellis

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

Havelock Ellis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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

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

Havelock Ellis

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

Havelock Ellis

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

Havelock Ellis

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

Havelock Ellis