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
Life is livable because we know that whatever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos
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.
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.
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
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.
To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.
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
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands
The place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum
What we call "Progress"is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
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.