Havelock Ellis Quotes

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

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

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.

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 the pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.

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.

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.

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

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women.

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

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

'Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.

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.

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.