The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing.
— Havelock Ellis
There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.
Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation that make it enjoyable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.
One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.
The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
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.
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.
When love is suppressed hate takes its place.
The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.
Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.
Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.
At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.
The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.
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.
There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.
A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
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.
The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.
The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.
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.
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 more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
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.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
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.
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.
Man lives by imagination.
