Quotes by Ellen Key

• Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.
• The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
• 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.
• The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
• When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
• Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.
• At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
• Art, that great undogmatized church.
• 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.
• Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.