Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Havelock Ellis - Page 2

The mother is the child's supreme parent.

Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet toits god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.

Philosophy is a purely personal matter. A genuine philosopher's credo is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same philosophy.

We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

Sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities.

All arguments are meaningless until we gain personal experience. One must win one's own place in the spiritual world painfully and alone. There is no other way of salvation. The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.

I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex—with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother.

So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.

Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.

Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.

Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.

Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that expressthemselves 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. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first.

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

There is nothing more fragile than civilization.

The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.

All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.

There can be no sexual love without lust; but, on the other hand, until the currents of lust in the organism have been irradiatedas to affect other parts of the psychic organism--at the least the affections and the social feelings--it is not yet sexual love. Lust, the specific sexual impulse, is indeed the primary and essential element in this synthesis, for it alone is adequate to the end of reproduction, not only in animals but in men. But it is not until lust is expanded and irradiated that it develops into the exquisite and enthralling flower of love.

To make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

Beauty is the child of love.

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.

Heroes exterminate each other for the benefit of people who are not heroes.

Einstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted.

Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.

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 a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.

Courtship, properly understood, is the process whereby both the male and the female are brought into that state of sexual tumescence which is a more or less necessary condition for sexual intercourse. The play of courtship cannot, therefore, be considered to be definitely brought to an end by the ceremony of marriage; it may more properly be regarded as the natural preliminary to every act of coitus.

The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.

The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people.

However well organised the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.

Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.

The modesty of women, which, in its most primitive form among animals, is based on sexual periodicity, is, with that periodicity, an essential condition of courtship.

A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.

The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.

Every ist writes his own autobiography.

The largely objective character of beauty is further indicated by the fact that to a considerable extent beauty is the expression of health. A well and harmoniously developed body, tense muscles, an elastic and finely toned skin, bright eyes, grace and animation of carriage- all these things which are essential to beauty are the conditions of health.

...aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion; from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful which are unbeautiful from the point of view of him who is not a lover, and the greater the degree to which the lover is swayed by his passion the greater the extent to which his normal aesthetic standard is liable to be modified.

The sexual regions constitute a particularly vulnerable spot, and remain so even in man, and the need for their protection which thus exists conflicts with the prominent display required for sexual allurement. This end is far more effectively attained, with greater advantage and less disadvantage, by concentrating the chief ensigns of sexual attractiveness on the upper and more conspicuous parts of the body. This method is well-nigh universal among animals as well as in man.

There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

No faith is our own that we have not arduously won.

The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated—of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way

Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

Liberty is always unfinished business

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.

Where there is most labour there is not always most life.