Top 17 Wise Ellen Key Quotes To Live By (WISDOM)
“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.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
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
“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.”
Ellen Key
7 Ellen Key Quotes on Love
“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
“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.”
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
4 Ellen Key Quotes on Children
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.
Ellen Key
“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.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
Ellen Key
10 Ellen Key Quotes on Education
“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.”
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
“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 realized 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
“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.”
Ellen Key
“It is in the province of home and society that woman has fashioned the customs. Here, women’s approval and disapproval, wishes and wants, have been quite as formative and reformative as the action of the sea on the mainland.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
Ellen Key
12 Ellen Key Quotes on Women
“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 program of institutional upbringing, or through the intimate renaissance of the home.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
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
“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
“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 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.”
Ellen Key
“While the women of the older generation were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining ‘a work and a duty,’ however monotonous and wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a pleasurable labor has fortunately increased.”
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
“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.”
Ellen Key
“Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house management, dress-making, etc.”
Ellen Key
2 Ellen Key Quotes on Art
6 Ellen Key Quotes on War
“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
“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
“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
“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.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
Ellen Key
19 Ellen Key Quotes that Will Make You Think
“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.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
Ellen Key
“When the sense of solidarity has been developed to such a point that each one feels the cause of all others as his own, we shall be drawing near to international and to social peace.”
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
“When, in any ethical department, unity is attained between outer demands and inner desires, between nature and conscience, between the needs of society and the individual, the moral formula is void because inner necessity then makes it psychically and physically impossible to break the outer law. Thus, true morality is attained.”
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
“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.”
Ellen Key
“Those who profess the faith of fife 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 recognized by the prevailing idealism.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
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
“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
“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.”
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 decisive factor for the future of Europe – and before all things, for the ‘restoration’ of Europe – will be whether political thought and national feelings are influenced by the reality of internationalism.”
Ellen Key
“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.”
Ellen Key
(MUST READ) The Morality of Woman and Other Essays
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