Havelock Ellis Quotes



Best 15 Quotes by Havelock Ellis

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

“Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.”

“Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.”

“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.”

“The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.”

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

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

Little Essays of Love and Virtue Quotes

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

Little Essays of Love and Virtue

On Life and Sex Quotes

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

On Life and Sex

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

On Life and Sex

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

On Life and Sex

Studies in the Psychology of Sex Quotes

“Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.”

Studies in the Psychology of Sex

The Dance of Life Quotes

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

The Dance of Life

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

The Dance of Life

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

The Dance of Life

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“People today associate rivalry with boundless aggression and find
it difficult to conceive of competition that does not lead directly to
thoughts of murder. Kohut writes of one of his patients: "Even as
a child he had become afraid of emotionally cathected competitiveness
for fear of the underlying (near delusional) fantasies of
exerting absolute, sadistic power." Herbert Hendin says of the
students he analyzed and interviewed at Columbia that "they
could conceive of no competition that did not result in someone's
annihilation." The prevalence of such fears helps to explain why Americans
have become uneasy about rivalry unless it is accompanied by the
disclaimer that winning and losing don't matter or that games are
unimportant anyway. The identification of competition with the
wish to annihilate opponents inspires Dorcas Butt's accusation
that competitive sports have made us a nation of militarists, fascists,
and predatory egoists; have encouraged "poor sportsmanship
" in all social relations; and have extinguished cooperation
and compassion.”


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