Ellen Key Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Ellen Key
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.

Ellen Key
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
The mother is the precious possession of the nation, so precious that society advances its highest well being when it protects the functions of the mother.

Ellen Key
All philanthropy... is only a savory fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer.

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

Ellen Key
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
For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself... to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.

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

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

Ellen Key
Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.

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

Ellen Key