Havelock Ellis (1859 – 1939)
British doctor, sexual psychologist and social reformer.
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.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
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.
The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women.
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
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.
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.
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 sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
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.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?
What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.
One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.
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.
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.
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
'Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.
Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.