Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis (1859–1939,) was a British physician, writer, and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, including transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis. He served as president of the Galton Institute and, like many intellectuals of his era, supported eugenics.
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Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Dreams
A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Religion
There is nothing more fragile than civilization.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Civilization
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
Men who know themselves are no longer fools; they stand on the threshold of the Door of Wisdom.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Foolishness, Fools, Self-Discovery
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
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Revolution, Civilization
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Difficulty, Obstacles
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Danger, Risk
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
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: Dance, Dancing
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Civilization
The place where optimism flourishes most is in the lunatic asylum.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Optimism
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 absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Absence, Beauty
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.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Charm
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Genius
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
Topics: Drugs
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
We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Consistency, Change
No faith is our own that we have not arduously won.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Belief, Faith
The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.
—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
Topics: Thinking, Thought
The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Romance, Sex
Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Envy, Jealousy
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: Criminals, Crime
To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Leadership, Leaders
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
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met along the way
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Philosophy
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
—Havelock Ellis
Topics: Life, Balance, Letting Go
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