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Art
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Every artist writes his own autobiography.
-Havelock Ellis
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Beauty
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The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
-Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, 1914
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Belief
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A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
-Havelock Ellis
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Civilization
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All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
-Havelock Ellis
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Conservation
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The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
-Havelock Ellis
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Crime
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We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.
-Havelock Ellis
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Dance, Dancing
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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.
-Havelock Ellis
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Danger
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However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
-Havelock Ellis
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Difficulty
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The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
-Havelock Ellis
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Dreams
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Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
-Havelock Ellis
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Drugs
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There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.
-Havelock Ellis
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Envy / Jealousy
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Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
-Havelock Ellis, On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue, ch. 1, 1937
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Evolution
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It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.
-Havelock Ellis
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Fools, Foolishness
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Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
-Havelock Ellis
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Leadership
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To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
-Havelock Ellis
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Life
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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.
-Havelock Ellis
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There is no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient novelty is forever renewed. We realize the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of Heraclitus, the Ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like measure extinguished. That translucent and mysterious Flame shines undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always miraculously incalculable, an ever-flowing stream of fire. The world is moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them! Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresaw--to say nothing of older and vaster events--the Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has always been burning at! The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which aspect you prefer. You will always be right.
-Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, November 13, 1913
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Music
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I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.
-Havelock Ellis
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Optimism
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The place where optimism flourishes most is in the lunatic asylum.
-Havelock Ellis
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Pain
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Pain and death are a part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
-Havelock Ellis
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Progress
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What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another.
-Havelock Ellis
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Struggle
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The conflict of forces and the struggle of opposing wills are of the essence of our universe and alone hold it together.
-Havelock Ellis
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Suicide
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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.
-Havelock Ellis
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Thought
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Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
-Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923
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War
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There is nothing that war has ever achieved we could not better achieve without it.
-Havelock Ellis
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Books by and about Havelock Ellis