Havelock Ellis Quotes
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I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex—with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
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Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.
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Liberty is always unfinished business...
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Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
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What we call morals is simply blind obedience to words of command.
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The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
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Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
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Sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities.
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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.
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Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.
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The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
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Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that expressthemselves 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. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first.
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Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.
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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.
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All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
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No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.
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Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
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The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
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Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.
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Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
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In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way...
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The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
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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.
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To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.