Havelock Ellis Quotes (35 Quotes)


    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.

    At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.

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

    Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.

    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.


    The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands.

    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.

    Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.

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

    The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.

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

    No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.

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

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

    The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.

    The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.

    The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.

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

    Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.

    The place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum.

    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.

    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.

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


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


    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.

    Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.

    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.

    Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

    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.

    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.

    The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

    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

    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.


    More Havelock Ellis Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Society & Civilization - Education - Man - Life - Wisdom & Knowledge - Place - Love - Chance - Learning - Religions & Spirituality - Affection - Genius - Progress - Experience - Prejudice - Work & Career - Emotions - Morality - Death & Dying - View All Havelock Ellis Quotations

    Related Authors


    Carl Jung - Rollo May - Philip Zimbardo - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - M. Scott Peck - Karl Jaspers - Ivan Pavlov - Emile Coue - B. F. Skinner - Alfred Adler


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections