At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
Ellen KeyConventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content.
Ellen KeyFormerly, 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 KeyEverything, 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 KeyThe 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.
Ellen KeyLove requires peace, love will dream; it cannot live upon the remnants of our time and our personality.
Ellen KeyThe educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
Ellen KeyAll 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.
Ellen Keythe 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 KeyThe 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.
Ellen KeyThe 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.
Ellen KeyAnyone 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 KeyThe very forces that liberty has set free work against the dangerous consequences of liberty.
Ellen KeyThe 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 KeyNothing 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.
Ellen KeyA 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