Ellen Key Quotes

23 quotes in 366 categories

• 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…
• 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 educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
• Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• Is human love the growth of the human will ?
• Art, that great undogmatized church.
• 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…
• Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.
• All philanthropy is only a savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
• When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
• 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…
• 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…

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