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
...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.
Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people.
We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.
To make a mountain out of a mole-hill.
Man lives by imagination.
Courtship, properly understood, is the process whereby both the male and the female are brought into that state of sexual tumescence which is a more or less necessary condition for sexual intercourse. The play of courtship cannot, therefore, be considered to be definitely brought to an end by the ceremony of marriage; it may more properly be regarded as the natural preliminary to every act of coitus.
All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.
The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.
Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.
Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
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.
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.