Top 90 Havelock Ellis Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.”

— Havelock Ellis

52. “Man lives by imagination.”

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

54. “The modesty of women, which, in its most primitive form among animals, is based on sexual periodicity, is, with that periodicity, an essential condition of courtship.”

— Havelock Ellis

55. “Heroes exterminate each other for the benefit of people who are not heroes.”

— Havelock Ellis

56. “The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.”

— Havelock Ellis

57. “Beauty is the child of love.”

— Havelock Ellis

58. “Einstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted.”

— Havelock Ellis

59. “The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.”

— Havelock Ellis

60. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

61. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

62. “One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.”

— Havelock Ellis

63. “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

64. “Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.”

— Havelock Ellis

65. “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

66. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

67. “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

68. “It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.”

— Havelock Ellis

69. “Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.”

— Havelock Ellis

70. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

71. “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

72. “The husband – by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition – regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.”

— Havelock Ellis

73. “Steinach found that, when sexually mature white rats were castrated, though at first they remained as potent as ever, their potency gradually declined; sexual excitement, however, and sexual inclination always persisted.”

— Havelock Ellis

74. “The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.”

— Havelock Ellis

75. “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

76. “The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother.”

— Havelock Ellis

77. “So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.”

— Havelock Ellis

78. “The world’s greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.”

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

80. “The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated – of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired.”

— Havelock Ellis

81. “Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.”

— Havelock Ellis

82. “At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.”

— Havelock Ellis

83. “When we read certain portions of “Leaves of Grass” we seem to see a vast phalanx of Great Companions passing for ever along the cosmic roads, stalwart Pioneers of the Universe. There are superb young men, athletic girls, splendid and savage old men – for the weak seem to have perished by the roadside.”

— Havelock Ellis

84. “The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.”

— Havelock Ellis

85. “A woman may not want a lover, but may yet want a child.”

— Havelock Ellis

86. “Where there is most labour there is not always most life.”

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Havelock Ellis

88. “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.”

— Havelock Ellis

89. “Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.”

— Havelock Ellis

90. “It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.”

— Havelock Ellis

91. “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

92. “The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.”

— Havelock Ellis

93. “Luther, again, always compared the sexual to the excretory impulse, and said that marriage was just as necessary as the emission of urine.”

— Havelock Ellis