Ellen Key Quotes

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

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.

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.

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.

The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

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.

The destruction of the personality is the great evil of the time.

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

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.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy.

Love requires peace, love will dream; it cannot live upon the remnants of our time and our personality.

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.

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.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

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.

The socially pernicious, racially wasteful, and soul-withering consequences of the working of mothers outside the home must cease. And this can only come to pass, either through the programme of institutional upbringing, or through the intimate renaissance of the home.

The very forces that liberty has set free work against the dangerous consequences of liberty.

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.

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.

The home was a closed sphere touched only at its edge by the world's evolution.

All philanthropy — no age has seen more of it than our own — is only a savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer.

Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content.