“The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.”
Beauty
“It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.”
SuccessAll Quotes by Havelock Ellis
“Man lives by imagination.”
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.”
Men“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.”
Art“Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.”
Wisdom“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.”
Architecture“The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.”
Music“Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.”
Death“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.”
Family“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”
Art“Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?”
Dreams“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.”
Happiness“A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.”
Faith“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.”
Romantic“Every artist writes his own autobiography.”
Art“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.”
Knowledge“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.”
Education“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.”
Age“There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.”
War“Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.”
Money