1849-1926, Swedish Author, Feminist
All 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 Key – [Philanthropists]
Art, that great undogmatized church.
Ellen Key – [Arts and Artists]
Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.
Ellen Key – [Punishment]
For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.
Ellen Key – [Children]
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
Ellen Key – [Marriage]
Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.
Ellen Key – [Fidelity]
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 – [Education]
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 – [Feminism]
When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
Ellen Key – [Ideals and Idealism]