Quotes by Havelock Ellis

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

"The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum."

"Jealousy: that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"'Charm' - which means the power to effect work without employing brute force - is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm."

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

"The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Man lives by imagination."

"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."

"I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness."

"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."