Havelock Ellis
Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.Collection: Jealousy
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.Collection: Family
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.Collection: Architecture
'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.Collection: Strength
Every artist writes his own autobiography.Collection: Art
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.Collection: Death
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.Collection: Poetry
Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?Collection: Dreams
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.Collection: Beauty
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Romantic
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.Collection: War
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.Collection: Education
Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.Collection: Art
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.Collection: Chance
The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.Collection: Romantic
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.Collection: Age
Man lives by imagination.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Sympathy
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.Collection: Change
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
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.
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.
When love is suppressed hate takes its place.
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.
The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.
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.
What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
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 more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.
One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.
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.