Ellen Key Quotes

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

Ellen Key

#2. Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life's gracious gifts to its elect.

Ellen Key

#3. 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

#4. While the women of the older generation were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining 'a work and a duty,' however monotonous and wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a pleasurable labour has fortunately increased.

Ellen Key

#5. Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society.

Ellen Key

#6. 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

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

Ellen Key

#8. It is not sufficient for the young to devote their enthusiasm, their courage, their ambition, their self-sacrifice to the great ideas of the time; the young must not only preserve but increase their powers if they are to be really equal to their eternal task: that of drawing the age in advance.

Ellen Key

#9. If, in the coming thousand years, a feminine culture shall really supplement the masculine, then this will be exactly in the measure in which women have the courage to create and to act as most feminists now do not even dare think.

Ellen Key

#10. The condition of all development is not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action.

Ellen Key

#11. 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

#12. Those who profess the faith of Life regard the ideals of mankind as an expression of man's higher needs. Ideals which were once incentives to development thus become a drag upon it whenever life's needs demand new forms that are not recognised by the prevailing idealism.

Ellen Key

#13. Why is the heart that is broken considered so much more valuable than the one or the two who must cause the pain lest they themselves perish?"

Ellen Key

#14. The decisive factor for the future of Europe - and before all things, for the 'restoration' of Europe - will be whether political thought and national feelings are influenced by the reality of internationalism.

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

#16. Altered social conditions may remove certain ailments and deformities in existing society. But the new and more beautiful society will not be formed exclusively - or even mainly - by improved conditions, but above all by more perfect human beings.

Ellen Key

#17. 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

#18. The current of emotion, which was formerly directed to gaining eternal bliss, is turned in socialism - in the same degree as the latter is permeated by evolutionism - towards the perfecting of earthly life.

Ellen Key

#19. The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child tendencies to deviation.

Ellen Key

#20. One can best observe a movement of the time - its dangers as well as its advantages - by scrutinising it in its strongest, most pronounced form.

Ellen Key

#21. 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.

Ellen Key

#22. Children must be impressed with the fact that the greatest heroes are those who fight to help others, not those who fight for power or glory. They must be made to understand that victory does not prove that the thing fought for is right, nor that defeat proves that a cause is wrong.

Ellen Key

#23. Is human love the growth of the human will ?

Ellen Key

#24. Morality in its noblest forms remains inexplicable unless one takes into account that power of growth in the human soul which has led generation after generation from lower religious and ethical standards to higher ones which often clash with worldly advantages.

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

#26. Certainly it may, under present imperfect conditions, often be a duty not to destroy the outward form of marriage for the sake of the children. But by no means can this duty be preached as universally binding.

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

#28. In order to overcome the spirit that creates war, mothers must begin in the tender years of childhood to teach children that right must be the foundation of all might, that authority can be exercised without the help of fists.

Ellen Key

#29. On the question of marriage, as in all other respects, Lutheranism is a compromise, a bridge between two logical views of the universe: the Catholic-Christian and the Individualistic Monist. And bridges are made to go over, not to stand upon.

Ellen Key

#30. Love, as life, will fortunately remain an eternal mystery which no science will be able to penetrate and which reason cannot rule. Our only hope for the future is that man, endowed with a more delicate sense, will listen to the secrets of his own life.

Ellen Key

#31. War can be prevented only by broad-minded statesmanship - a statesmanship that understands how to enlist people's interests in a leading cause.

Ellen Key

#32. 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

#33. When the sense of solidarity has been developed to such a point that each one feels the cause of all others as his own, we shall be drawing near to international and to social peace.

Ellen Key

#34. Men have desired, and justly, that women should learn from their confessions in regard to the conflict between man and woman. But woman, because of the conventional conception of womanly purity, has been intimidated from conceding to men a deep insight into her erotic life experiences.

Ellen Key

#35. A new principle cannot be put into effect without bringing with it new mistakes. But we may, however, be convinced that the laws of life - to which belongs the law that suffering follows the misuse of freedom - will finally be able to bring everything within its right limits.

Ellen Key

#36. What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of nature and recognized that the great secret of education lies hidden in the maxim, 'Do not educate'?

Ellen Key

#37. Art, that great undogmatized church.

Ellen Key

#38. Love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy ...

Ellen Key

#39. It is in the province of home and society that woman has fashioned the customs. Here, women's approval and disapproval, wishes and wants, have been quite as formative and reformative as the action of the sea on the mainland.

Ellen Key

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. All philanthropy is only a savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer.

Ellen Key

#43. When it comes to the application to life of existing laws and morals, woman, because of her willing receptiveness, her elasticity and adaptability combined with her power of tenacious retention, has exerted an influence, the value of which is too vast to be measured.

Ellen Key

#44. All thoughtful persons perceive that the ideas of the morality of sexual relations upheld by the religions and laws of the Western nations are in our time undergoing a radical transformation.

Ellen Key

#45. The woman pastor would often be, especially for women and children, a better minister than the clergyman; for them also, the woman judge might often surpass the man in penetration and understanding.

Ellen Key

#46. Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.

Ellen Key

#47. The educator wants the child to be finished at once and perfect. He forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a sense of honour - habits that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity.

Ellen Key

#48. The serious questions that are talked out or strangled with red tape are more numerous than those that are killed by silence; the number of people whose ideas are knocked on the head in societies is greater in our day than that of the solitary fighters who go under.

Ellen Key

#49. Only by keeping oneself in constant process of growth, under the constant influence of the best things in one's own age, does one become a companion halfway good enough for one's children.

Ellen Key

#50. Just as little as terror - not even the terror of war - can save the world, just as little can hate ever be anything uplifting. Love is the only firm ground for peace - not only love for one's fellowmen, but first of all, love of one's country.

Ellen Key

#51. Ambition has developed into a passion which drives women, as well as men, to great works - and small deeds. Formerly competitors in the race for men, they are now competing in the race for social tasks and distinctions.

Ellen Key

#52. The young must be prepared to experience innumerable disappointments and yet not fail.

Ellen Key

#53. Every young person has to bear the burden - heavier in proportion as the individuality is richer - of accommodating himself to existence now that it is no longer seen with the eyes of a child, the eyes to which everything is as it should be.

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

#55. The married woman as family provider beside the man, often also in place of the man, but always however subservient to the man's dominion - this is the worst form of woman slavery our time has created.

Ellen Key

#56. 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

#57. Countless are the women parasites who, to satisfy their craving for pleasure and luxury, impoverish father or husband. These lame limbs in the social organism, which themselves accomplish nothing, but for whom all other limbs work, are the most flagrant example of womanly immorality in the present.

Ellen Key

#58. For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!

Ellen Key

#59. The storm and stress period of women and the new social and psychological formations thereby entailed must indeed extend far into the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with man.

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

#62. Our age gives the more receptive among the young such a sense of social responsibility that one is inclined at times to fear that social interests may encroach upon individual development, that a knowledge of all the ills affecting the community may act as too powerful a damper on the joys of youth.

Ellen Key

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. The work of popular education, the temperance movement, the peace movement, are to a great extent carried on by the young. Their meetings show that the young understand one of their tasks: that of bringing together the different classes through social intercourse.

Ellen Key

#66. 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.

Ellen Key

#67. Socialism and the woman movement are two mighty streams which drag along with them great parts of the firm formations which they touch.

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

#70. How the woman movement has elevated woman's work, since it has raised the standard of qualification in many fields and increased the feeling of responsibility in all!

Ellen Key

#71. 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

#72. Tenderness has created the first 'social order' - that of the mother with her offspring. Through motherliness, woman later makes her great contributions to civilization.

Ellen Key

#73. 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

#74. Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned for or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At the same time, there is the other certainty that, through progressive evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment, they may be transformed.

Ellen Key

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

Ellen Key

#76. Even if national peculiarities in character and in laws occasion differences in the curve which the woman movement describes in the different countries, yet everywhere the movement has had the same causes, must follow the same main direction, and - sooner or later - must have the same effects.

Ellen Key