Ellen Key's Quotes

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.

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 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 would revolt with their whole being.

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

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.

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.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

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

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