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" 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
Good
Own
Age
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" 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
Humanity
War
Strength
" 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. "
Ellen Key
Habits
Devotion
Duty
" 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
Differences
Direction
Character
" On the whole, the experience that the activity of the soul obeys the law of least resistance has been verified even in regard to women's social morals. As a rule, these have been focused on the family and on charity - among other reasons, because woman's sense of duty seldom finds means of expression in other directions. "
Ellen Key
Women
Soul
Family
" The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control of the environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the education which is allowed to go on by itself. "
Ellen Key
Art
Education
Mistake
" 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
Impossible
Law
Nature
" 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
Socialism
Bliss
Emotion
" Countless are the women parasites who, to satisfy their craving for pleasure and luxury, impoverish father or husband. These lame limbs in the social organism, which themselves accomplish nothing, but for whom all other limbs work, are the most flagrant example of womanly immorality in the present. "
Ellen Key
Luxury
Father
Work
" 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
War
Worst
Men
" 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
Time
Slavery
Woman
" To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire - that is to give him a real moral strength. "
Ellen Key
Fire
Strength
Soul
" Art, that great undogmatized church. "
Ellen Key
Art
Great
Church
" 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. "
Ellen Key
Now
Burden
Child
" 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
Children
Long
Women
" 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
Age
Time
Great
" Children must be impressed with the fact that the greatest heroes are those who fight to help others, not those who fight for power or glory. They must be made to understand that victory does not prove that the thing fought for is right, nor that defeat proves that a cause is wrong. "
Ellen Key
Help Others
Fight
Children
" 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
Humanity
Power
Unity
" 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. "
Ellen Key
Child
Anything
Rather
" 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. "
Ellen Key
Movement
Observe
Time
" Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity. "
Ellen Key
Observation
Duty
Pledge
" 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
Passion
Great
Ambition
" 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
Freedom
Woman
Courage
" Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism. "
Ellen Key
Struggle
Altruism
Liberty
" Happiness lies so far from man, but he must begin by daring to will it. "
Ellen Key
Begin
Far
Happiness
" In order to overcome the spirit that creates war, mothers must begin in the tender years of childhood to teach children that right must be the foundation of all might, that authority can be exercised without the help of fists. "
Ellen Key
Foundation
War
Childhood
" 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. "
Ellen Key
Ideas
Silence
Head
" 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
Value
Influence
Life
" Socialism and the woman movement are two mighty streams which drag along with them great parts of the firm formations which they touch. "
Ellen Key
Touch
Great
Movement
" 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! "
Ellen Key
Power
Poor
Life
" 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
Injustice
Others
Struggle