Top 50 Ellen Key Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tenderness has created the first ‘social order’ – that of the mother with her offspring. Through motherliness, woman later makes her great contributions to civilization.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

In every new generation, the impulses supposed to have been rooted out by discipline in the child break forth again when the struggle for existence – of the individual in society, of the society in the life of the state – begins. These passions are not transformed by the prevalent education of the day, but only repressed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The simplest formula for the new conception of morality, which is beginning to be opposed to the moral dogma still esteemed by all society, but especially by the women, might be summed up in these words: Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.