Havelock Ellis (1859 – 1939)
British doctor, sexual psychologist and social reformer.
Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?
The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product.
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
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.
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
'Homosexual' is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it.
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
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.
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.
One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.
What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.
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.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
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.
The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
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 Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.
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.