Havelock Ellis Quotes
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Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.
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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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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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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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The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
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What we call morals is simply blind obedience to words of command.
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Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.
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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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Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
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All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
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Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
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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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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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Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.
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The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
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No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.
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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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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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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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There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
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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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The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.