Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

— Havelock Ellis

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

— Havelock Ellis

A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

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.

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?

— Havelock Ellis

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.

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

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.

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.

— Havelock Ellis

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

— Havelock Ellis

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.

— Havelock Ellis

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

Pain and death are a part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis