Daily Inspiration Quote by Havelock Ellis

Ellis slips a quiet grenade into the era’s cult of efficiency. “The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product” reads like a rebuke to the industrial imagination of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when progress was increasingly measured by output, utility, and clean causal chains: you make X to get Y. A psychologist writing in that climate is almost obligated to notice how human life refuses that math.

The line works because it smuggles in an inversion of purpose. It doesn’t merely praise happy accidents; it demotes the supposed “product” to a pretext. In psychological terms, it nods to how secondary effects often carry the real psychic weight: the conversation sparked by a task, the confidence gained from failure, the intimacy created by detours, the new desire discovered while pursuing an old one. The phrasing “sometimes” is doing strategic labor. Ellis isn’t selling mysticism or anti-planning; he’s defending complexity against the tidy moralism of results.

There’s also a cultural subtext that feels especially Ellis: Victorian and Edwardian society loved official narratives of propriety, productivity, and self-control, while private life overflowed with cravings, curiosities, and contradictions. The “by-product” can be read as the unintended self that emerges alongside the intended self. In that sense, the quote doubles as an argument for tolerance: what society dismisses as incidental, wasteful, or improper may be where meaning, creativity, and even health actually concentrate.