Havelock Ellis
51 quotes
Biography
"Every artist writes his own autobiography."
"All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on."
"It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success."
"The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum."
"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 art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves 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."
"The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves 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."
"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."
"The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw."
"Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself."
"Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?"
"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."
"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."
"A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray."
"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."
"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 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."
"Man lives by imagination."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry."
"The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer."
"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."
"Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry."