Havelock Ellis Quotes

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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