Havelock Ellis

No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.

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 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.

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.

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.

What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.

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.

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

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.

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.

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.

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.

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

The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.

The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.

A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.