Havelock Ellis Quotes

Mysticism, poor mysticism! When it is underestimated and oversimplified, it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

I have always been interested in religion, especially in forms of ecstatic religion, where people are touched directly by the Spirit and go completely out of themselves.

I'm interested in spirituality and in religion and our relationship to the divine.

Faith is spiritualized imagination.

No one in human history has given as much thought to the interweaving of altered states of consciousness and religion as I have.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion - I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more - I could be martyred for my religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that.

We can no more do without spirituality than we can do without food, shelter, or clothing.

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.

Don't be confused that my interest in religion, faith, and spirituality is driven by any sense of faith or spirituality of my own.

It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.

The word 'religion' is only a label. What lies behind that, the most important thing of all, is the word 'faith'. You either have faith, or you don't have faith, or you have degrees of faith - and if you have degrees of faith, then you become agnostic. You're kind of in-between, or you're on the fence.

Faith is as essential to the spiritual realm as oxygen is to the natural realm.

A religion without mystery must be a religion without God.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we're atheist.

Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That's a unique claim in the literature of religion.

I'm not a big fan of religion for that reason. But I am a true believer in God, and I have great faith, and I think that a spiritual connection with something is a really important part of our experience. That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the church.

I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

I guess any time you believe in God you've got to be considered a spiritual person. That would make me a spiritual person. But I don't really know what that means.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

Thus in Christianity the alienation had become total, and it was this total alienation that was the biggest obstacle to the progress of self-consciousness.

I'm interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.