Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis

29 quotes

Havelock Ellis is a British physician, eugenicist, writer, and social reformer whose words have traveled far beyond their original audience. Their thinking spans from Art to Women, revealing a mind that refused to stay in one lane. 41 of Havelock Ellis's sharpest quotes live here, spanning themes of Art, Women, Romantic, Nature, and Knowledge. Readers often gravitate to this one: "The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer."

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

— Havelock Ellis

Jealousy

All Quotes by Havelock Ellis

“What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.”

— Havelock Ellis

Change

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

— Havelock Ellis

Dreams

“It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.”

— Havelock Ellis

Success

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

— Havelock Ellis

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.”

— Havelock Ellis

Family

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

— Havelock Ellis

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.”

— Havelock Ellis

Nature

“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

Architecture

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

— Havelock Ellis

Money

“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.”

— Havelock Ellis

Education

“A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.”

— Havelock Ellis

Faith

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

— Havelock Ellis

Wisdom

“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.”

— Havelock Ellis

Home

“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.”

— Havelock Ellis

Knowledge

“There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.”

— Havelock Ellis

Religion

“For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.”

— Havelock Ellis

Education

“Man lives by imagination.”

— Havelock Ellis

Imagination

“Failing to find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all.”

— Havelock Ellis

Women

“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.”

— Havelock Ellis

Romantic

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

— Havelock Ellis

War