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" 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
History
Women
Right
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" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Science
Man
Love
" The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. "
Ellen Key
World
Becomes
More
" 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
" Those who profess the faith of Life 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 recognised by the prevailing idealism. "
Ellen Key
Faith
New
Man
" The young must be prepared to experience innumerable disappointments and yet not fail. "
Ellen Key
Be Prepared
Young
Experience
" 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
" 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
" 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
Love
Marriage
Love Is
" 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
Experience
Mind
Alone
" 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
Stand
Two
Bridge
" 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
" 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
Child
Experience
Life
" Morality in its noblest forms remains inexplicable unless one takes into account that power of growth in the human soul which has led generation after generation from lower religious and ethical standards to higher ones which often clash with worldly advantages. "
Ellen Key
Ethical
Soul
Generation
" When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination. "
Ellen Key
Imagination
Need
Art
" Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism. "
Ellen Key
Struggle
Altruism
Liberty
" 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
Women
Man
Marriage
" 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
Day
Education
Child
" 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
" Men have desired, and justly, that women should learn from their confessions in regard to the conflict between man and woman. But woman, because of the conventional conception of womanly purity, has been intimidated from conceding to men a deep insight into her erotic life experiences. "
Ellen Key
Life
Women
Woman
" 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
" 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
Human
New
Perfect
" 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
" Whereas nationalism still seeks power, honour, and glory through means that endanger other countries, patriotism knows that a country's strength and honour can only be permanently safeguarded through concourse with other countries. And whereas nationalism scoffs at the idea of international laws and regulations, patriotism seeks to create such. "
Ellen Key
Power
Patriotism
Strength
" 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
" 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 labour has fortunately increased. "
Ellen Key
Generation
Women
Work
" 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
" Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life's gracious gifts to its elect. "
Ellen Key
Life
Genius
Never