Ellen Key

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

— 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

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

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

— 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

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

— 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 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.

— 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

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

— Ellen Key

Art, that great undogmatized church.

— Ellen Key

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.

— 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

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

— Ellen Key

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

— Ellen Key

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

— Ellen Key

Happiness lies so far from man, but he must begin by daring to will it.

— Ellen Key

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

— Ellen Key

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.

— Ellen Key

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

— Ellen Key

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

— Ellen Key

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

— 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

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 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