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
Topics: Music
Men who know themselves are no longer fools; they stand on the threshold of the Door of Wisdom.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Fools, Self-Discovery, Foolishness
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Genius
To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Leadership, Leaders
To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Life
Philosophy is a purely personal matter. A genuine philosopher’s credo is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same philosophy.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Being Ourselves
The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Romance, Sex
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
Topics: Dancing, Dance
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Sex
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Art, Arts, One liners, Artists, Autobiography
The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.
—Havelock Ellis
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Balance, Letting Go, Life
Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Thinking, Thought
Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Envy, Jealousy
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Obstacles, Difficulty
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.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Fresh
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
Topics: Crime, Criminals
There is nothing more fragile than civilization.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Civilization
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
Topics: Evolution
Pain and death are a part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Pain
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Danger, Risk
It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Writing
The place where optimism flourishes most is in the lunatic asylum.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Optimism
What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Morality
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Belief
There is nothing that war has ever achieved we could not better achieve without it.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: War, Achievement
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
Topics: Suicide
No faith is our own that we have not arduously won.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Faith, Belief
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Civilization
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
Topics: Life and Living
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- H. G. Wells English Novelist, Historian
- Ramsay MacDonald British Head of State
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- Robert Owen British Social Reformer
- Arthur C. Clarke English Science-fiction Writer
- Frederic William Farrar British Theological Writer
- C. Northcote Parkinson British Historian
- Margaret Thatcher British Head of State
- Audrey Hepburn Belgian-British Actress
- Arnold Bennett British Novelist
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