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.

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.

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 greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

Man lives by imagination.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

'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 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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.