All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
Havelock Ellis
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.
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.
The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.
Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.
When love is suppressed hate takes its place.
The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
Man lives by imagination.
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
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.
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.
No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.
The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation that make it enjoyable.
It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth.
What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.
In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.
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.
The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
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.
Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.
However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.
The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.
Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.
It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.
The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing.
For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.
It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.
'Charm' - which means the power to effect work without employing brute force - is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.
The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.
