Havelock Ellis
Havelock Ellis
Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis, was an English physician, writer, progressive intellectual 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, as well as 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...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth2 February 1859
The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.
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.
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.
The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated—of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired.
Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.
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.
Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.
Beauty is the child of love.
A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God.
It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.
...aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion; from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful which are unbeautiful from the point of view of him who is not a lover, and the greater the degree to which the lover is swayed by his passion the greater the extent to which his normal aesthetic standard is liable to be modified.