Quotes by Havelock Ellis

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

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

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

“Every society has the criminals that it deserves.”

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

“The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.”

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

“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 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 consi...”

“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 th...”

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

“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.”

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

“The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.”

“Man lives by imagination.”

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

“Every artist writes his own autobiography.”

“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.”

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

“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.”