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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Unless one believes in a superhuman reason which directs evolution, one is bound to believe in a reason inherent in humanity, a motive power transcending that of each separate people, just as the power of the organism transcends that of the organ. This reason increases in proportion as the unity of mankind becomes established.
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.
When psychical phenomena have been as much investigated as physical, love will also receive its cumatology - that is, its science of waves. We shall follow the curves of the emotions through the ages, their movement of rise and fall, the oppositions and side-influences by which they have been determined.
Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life's gracious gifts to its elect.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the crying child is immediately isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever annoys others must not be with them, if this isolation is the absolute result and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The young must be prepared to experience innumerable disappointments and yet not fail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.Collection: Baby
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.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Happiness
The destruction of the personality is the great evil of the time.Collection: Evil
Love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy.Collection: Monogamy
Love requires peace, love will dream; it cannot live upon the remnants of our time and our personality.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Education
The very forces that liberty has set free work against the dangerous consequences of liberty.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Marriage
The home was a closed sphere touched only at its edge by the world's evolution.Collection: Women
All philanthropy — no age has seen more of it than our own — is only a savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer.Collection: Burning
Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Air
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.Collection: Children
Is human love the growth of the human will ?Collection: Growth
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.Collection: War