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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Ellen Key Quotes

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

The art of living demands that our interest in bringing forth flowers in our family life equal the interest we take in bringing them forth in our window gardens. So long as their home-life aesthetics have not become ethics, women need not expect husbands, children, or servants to feel happy in the homes of their creation.

– Ellen Key

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

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

– Ellen Key

At present, the most effective way of preventing war would be for statesmen to direct politics so as to support a sound nationalism. This leads to concordance between people of kindred race and languages, whereas the conquest and coercion of people of different race and language inevitably lead to new wars.

– Ellen Key

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

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

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

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

– Ellen Key

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

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

The exact sciences, which would be considered a priori as little adapted to women, for example mathematics, astronomy and physics, are exactly those in which thus far they have most distinguished themselves. This contains a warning against too precipitate conclusions about the intellectual life of woman.

– Ellen Key

It is not a dream that someday, nations will be able to settle their difficulties without war, just as individuals now settle their personal feuds without resorting to arguments of physical strength or sharp steel. For, then, humanity will have created international jurisdiction and a power to enforce its laws.

– Ellen Key

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

The present practice is to impress one’s own discoveries, opinions and principles on the child by constantly directing his actions. The last thing to be realised by the educator is that he really has before him an entirely new soul, a real self whose first and chief right is to think over the things with which he comes in contact.

– Ellen Key

No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others.

– 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Ellen Key

Christianity is sustained by the knowledge that the object of man’s life on earth is his development as an eternal being. Therefore, none of his expressions of life can be an end in itself, but must serve a higher purpose than the earthly life and happiness of the individual – or even than that of the race.

– Ellen Key

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

– Ellen Key

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

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

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

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

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

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