Havelock Ellis

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

Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

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

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.

It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

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

Failing to find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all.

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

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

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.

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.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?

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