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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Is human love the growth of the human will ?

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.

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