Havelock Ellis

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

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.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

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

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.

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

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.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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

Man lives by imagination.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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