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" Tenderness has created the first 'social order' - that of the mother with her offspring. Through motherliness, woman later makes her great contributions to civilization. "
Ellen Key
Civilization
Woman
Mother
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" Happiness lies so far from man, but he must begin by daring to will it. "
Ellen Key
Begin
Far
Happiness
" Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love. "
Ellen Key
Love
Moral
Marriage
" Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life's gracious gifts to its elect. "
Ellen Key
Life
Genius
Never
" Certainly it may, under present imperfect conditions, often be a duty not to destroy the outward form of marriage for the sake of the children. But by no means can this duty be preached as universally binding. "
Ellen Key
Children
Marriage
May
" 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
" 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
Action
Women
Woman
" 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
War
Peace
Love Is
" 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
" Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity. "
Ellen Key
Education
Skill
Liberal
" 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 exact sciences, which would be considered a priori as little adapted to women, for example mathematics, astronomy and physics, are exactly those in which thus far they have most distinguished themselves. This contains a warning against too precipitate conclusions about the intellectual life of woman. "
Ellen Key
Mathematics
Woman
Women
" 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
" 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 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
" The condition of all development is not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action. "
Ellen Key
Action
Better
Good
" 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
" 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
" How the woman movement has elevated woman's work, since it has raised the standard of qualification in many fields and increased the feeling of responsibility in all! "
Ellen Key
Work
Woman
Feeling
" 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
Own
Peace
Drawing
" 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
Evolution
Education
Time
" 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
" 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
" 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 realised 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
Own
Think
Practice
" 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
" When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination. "
Ellen Key
Imagination
Need
Art
" 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
Youth
Fear
Community
" 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
Marriage
Love
Modern
" 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
Work
Education
Together
" 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
Law
Mistakes
Freedom