Ellen Key famous quotes

04-14-2025

love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy ...
-- Ellen Key

#Monogamy #Strife
When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
-- Ellen Key

#Creating #Imagination #Doe
The mother is the most precious possessions of the nation, so precious that society advances its highest well-being when it protects the functions of the mother.
-- Ellen Key

#Mother #Baby #Function
At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
-- Ellen Key

#Children #Real #Rose
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
-- Ellen Key

#Love #Marriage #Moral
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
-- Ellen Key

#Art #World #Abstract
Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.
-- Ellen Key

#Pain #Punishment #Giving
The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
-- Ellen Key

#Light #Waiting #Educator
Nothing would more effectively further the development of education than for all flogging pedagogues to learn to educate with the head instead of with the hand.
-- Ellen Key

#Education #Educate
All philanthropy ... is only a savory fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer. This incense offering makes the air more endurable to passers-by, but it does not hinder the infection in the sewer from spreading.
-- Ellen Key

#Air #Offering #Doe
Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.
-- Ellen Key

#Teamwork #Peace #Military
The belief that we some day shall be able to prevent war is to me one with the belief in the possibility of making humanity really human.
-- Ellen Key

#Peace #War #Humanity
Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.
-- Ellen Key

#Liberty #Fidelity #Duty
Art, that great undogmatized church.
-- Ellen Key

#Art #Church
Love requires peace, love will dream; it cannot live upon the remnants of our time and our personality.
-- Ellen Key

#Dream #Personality #Remnants
Formerly, a nation that broke the peace, did not trouble to try and prove to the world that it was done solely from higher motives. ... Now war has a bad conscience. Now every nation assures us that it is bleeding for a human cause, the fate of which hangs in the balance of its victory ... No nation dares to admit the guilt of blood before the world.
-- Ellen Key

#War #Fate #Blood
The destruction of the personality is the great evil of the time.
-- Ellen Key

#Evil #Personality #Destruction
Anyone who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems.
-- Ellen Key

#Education #School #Despair
The very forces that liberty has set free work against the dangerous consequences of liberty.
-- Ellen Key

#Freedom #Liberty #Force
the higher the development of women, the more they suffer from the 'patriotic' mandate to bear many children to replace the nation's losses. For they know that, from the point of view of their personal development as well as that of the race, fewer but better children are to be preferred.
-- Ellen Key

#Children #Patriotic #Loss
Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content ...
-- Ellen Key

#Reality #Agreement #Appearance
A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.
-- Ellen Key

#Marriage #Ties #Secret Love
The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.
-- Ellen Key

#Self #Movement #Affirmation
For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.
-- Ellen Key

#Baby #Children #Taken
All philanthropy is only a savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer.
-- Ellen Key

#Burning #Charity #Mouths
Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.
-- Ellen Key

#Skills #Giving #Dignity
Is human love the growth of the human will ?
-- Ellen Key

#Growth #Humans #Human Will
The genius of happiness is still so rare. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar, but to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince; to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child.
-- Ellen Key

#Happiness #Children #Mean

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