Ellen Key Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy.

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

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

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

Art, that great undogmatized church.

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

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

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

Is human love the growth of the human will ?

The ever clearer consciousness that love can dispense with marriage, yet marriage cannot dispense with love, is already partially recognized by modern society, by the facility of divorce.

Happiness lies so far from man, but he must begin by daring to will it.

To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire - that is to give him a real moral strength.

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

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

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

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