Top 90 Havelock Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Havelock Ellis

2. “To make a mountain out of a mole-hill.”

— Havelock Ellis

3. “The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.”

— Havelock Ellis

4. “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”

— Havelock Ellis

5. “All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.”

— Havelock Ellis

6. “Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?”

— Havelock Ellis

7. “Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.”

— Havelock Ellis

8. “Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.”

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

11. “There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.”

— Havelock Ellis

12. “Charm is a woman’s strength just as strength is a man’s charm.”

— Havelock Ellis

13. “The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.”

— Havelock Ellis

14. “What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.”

— Havelock Ellis

15. “Sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities.”

— Havelock Ellis

16. “The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship.”

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

18. “A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.”

— Havelock Ellis

19. “The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.”

— Havelock Ellis

20. “Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.”

— Havelock Ellis

21. “We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.”

— Havelock Ellis

22. “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

23. “Every artist writes his own autobiography.”

— Havelock Ellis

24. “It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.”

— Havelock Ellis

25. “The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.”

— Havelock Ellis

26. “In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.”

— Havelock Ellis

27. “When love is suppressed hate takes its place.”

— Havelock Ellis

28. “Liberty is always unfinished business.”

— Havelock Ellis

29. “Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.”

— Havelock Ellis

30. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

31. “There is nothing more fragile than civilization.”

— Havelock Ellis

32. “To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.”

— Havelock Ellis

33. “What we call ‘morals’ is simply blind obedience to words of command.”

— Havelock Ellis

34. “Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people.”

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

37. “No faith is our own that we have not arduously won.”

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

39. “Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.”

— Havelock Ellis

40. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

41. “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

42. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

43. “All arguments are meaningless until we gain personal experience. One must win one’s own place in the spiritual world painfully and alone. There is no other way of salvation. The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.”

— Havelock Ellis

44. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

45. “The mother is the child’s supreme parent.”

— Havelock Ellis

46. “No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.”

— Havelock Ellis

47. “The great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul.”

— Havelock Ellis

48. “There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.”

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

50. “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