Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Havelock Ellis Writer

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: United Kingdom
  • Born: Feb 2, 1859
  • Died: Jul 8, 1939

Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis, was a British physician, writer, and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, including transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis. He served as president of the Galton Institute and, like many intellectuals of his era, supported eugenics.

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

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

The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.

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

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

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

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

There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.

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

Man lives by imagination.

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

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