Ellen Key

“ We must realise that every pebble by which one breaks into the glassy depths of the child's soul will extend its influence through centuries and centuries in ever widening circles. Through our fathers, without our will and without choice, we are given a destiny which controls the deepest foundation of our own being. Through our posterity, which we ourselves create, we can in a certain measure, as free beings, determine the future destiny of the human race. ”

“ Even for the few, to whom the relationships have already given happiness, must this be incomplete in the measure in which they feel sympathy with all the suffering about them. But above all is happiness rare because the genius for happiness is still so rare, is indeed on the whole the rarest genius. To possess it means to approach life with the humility of a beggar, but to treat it with the proud generosity of a prince; to bring to its totality the deep understanding of a great poet and to each of its moments the abandonment and ingenuousness of a child ”

“ The school should be nothing but the mental dining-room in which parents and teachers prepare intellectual bills-of-fare suitable for every child. The school must have the right to determine what it can place on its bill-of-fare, but the parents have the right to choose, from the mental nourishment supplied by it, the food adapted to their children. The phantom of general culture must be driven from school curricula and parents' brains; the training of the individual must be a reality substituted in its place; otherwise reform plans will be drawn up in vain. ”

“ We stand on the verge of a stage of culture which will be that of the depths, not, as hitherto, of the surface alone; a stage which will not be merely a culture through mankind, but culture of mankind. For the first time, the great fashioners of culture will be able to work in marble, instead of, as hitherto, being forced to work in snow. The true relation between the rights of the individual and those of the race will become in the field of love as important as the relation between the rights of the individual and those of society in the field of labour. ”

“ Equally destructive is a parent's want of reverence for the sources of life which meet them in a new being. Fathers and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted nature of the child. Until they see that the word "child" is only another expression for the conception of majesty; until they feel that it is the future which in the form of a child sleeps in their arms, and history which plays at their feet, they will not understand that they have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this new being as they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the stars. ”

“ The whole factor of love in the being of these women is shrivelled up as a bud that has never blossomed, and in enthusiasm for a duty, or for a woman friend, they find an expression for that sacrifice whose real aim they deny or overlook, a something which ends often by avenging itself in a tragic way.
I am simply insisting that every woman, who has not yet ceased to desire motherhood, has duties as a girl, and still more as a woman, to the unborn generation from which she cannot free herself without absolute selfishness. ”

“ The relentless force of nature’s uniting will shows itself not only in the way love brings together contradictions in marriage, but also in the rupture of marriage. A good wife, married to a good husband, loving and loved, is thus seized by a passion, incomprehensible to herself, for another man. Without reflection she gives herself up to her passion, to return again to the husband she has not ceased to love, but who never inspired in her the overmastering emotion whose purpose—according to the will of nature and of the woman herself—ought to have been a child. ”

“ How many untrue confessions have been forced by fear of blows; how much daring passion for action, spirit of adventure, play of fancy, and stimulus to discovery has been repressed by this same fear. Even where blows do not cause lying, they always hinder absolute straightforwardness and the down-right personal courage to show oneself as one is. As long as the word "blow" is used at all in a home, no perfect honour will be found in children. So long as the home and the school use this method of education, brutality will be developed in the child himself at the cost of humanity. ”

“ Mischievous children, obstinate characters, one-sided and original natures, are always martyrs at school because of their desire for action, their spirit of opposition, their so-called "stupidity." Only the easy-going, amiable, commonly endowed natures can keep some of their own individual tendencies, slip through the school, and at the same time get good certificates of industry, moral character, order, and progress. In the first-class modern school, the mobile structure of personality is forced into shape—or rather it is knocked about by wind and waves, like a pebble on the seashore. ”

“ To have the courage of one’s happiness, to be able to bear the pain inseparable from a rupture without pangs of conscience, is only in the power of those who act from their innermost necessity. That pairs of lovers outside the law now so often commit suicide together is no proof of the overmastering power of love; it rather proves the powerlessness of their emotion to dare and win the right of direct and immediate living and thus increasing the riches of life. For it is only to a love that is throughout a will to live that circumstances become as wax in the artist’s hand. ”

“ The query of a humourist, why he should do anything for posterity since posterity had done nothing for him, set me to thinking in my early youth in the most serious way. I felt that posterity had done much for its forefathers. It had given them an infinite horizon for the future beyond the bounds of their daily effort. We must in the child see the new fate of the human race; we must carefully treat the fine threads in the child's soul because these are the threads that one day will form the woof of world events. ”

“ It is impossible to attain this result under the torture of the crude methods in our present home and school training. We need new homes, new schools, new marriages, new social relations, for those new souls who are to feel, love, and suffer, in ways infinitely numerous that we now can not even name. Thus they will come to understand life; they will have aspirations and hopes; they will believe; they will pray. The conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these must be revolutionised so radically, that one now can only surmise what new forms will be created in future generations. ”

“ It is the pining for that human soul which is to release our own from this torment of solitude; a torment which was formerly allayed by repose in God, but which now seeks its rest with an equal, with a soul that has itself lain wakeful with eyelids heated from the same longing; a soul empowered by love to the miracle of redeeming our soul—as itself by ours is redeemed—from the sense of being a stranger upon earth; a soul before whose warmth our own lets fall the covering that the world’s coldness has imposed upon it and shows its secrets and its glories without shame. ”

“ To talk of the freedom of woman, of her individual right to control her actions, when she works like a beast of burden to reach a minimum of existence, to keep from dying of starvation, to talk of the freedom of women where conditions are such that the free choice of work, for man as well as for woman, is an empty phrase—to put it mildly, it is senseless. ”

“ Love may possess, according to his belief, no sterling value: he regards it as always a forged note with which nature obtains the co-operation of human beings—especially of women—to her ends.
This love knows no atmosphere but that of the alcoves where it has pursued its bought or stolen pleasure. It has never breathed the air of the wilds, the air which quivers with sunshine and shakes with storms; the air through which murmurs all life’s longing for renewal, all the wistful intuition of eternity born of a hunger for happiness, which raises generation above generation towards unknown goals ”

“ A society which calls itself Christian will no longer tolerate capital punishment, prostitution, stock exchange gambling, and child slavery. Men will not then as they do now, learn on their mother's breast to love their neighbours as themselves, and then tread in the footsteps of their fathers, trampling one another down in the struggle for bread.
Our reverence for God will then be found in our capacity to humanise existence by humanising the human race.
The youth of our day have not always successfully passed out of the Christian circles of ideals into another circle. ”

“ Here, if ever, woman’s nature reveals that its great genius is for love; that the higher a woman attains, the more certainly will her own honour, her own triumphs, her own future weigh lightly as a feather against the joy of being able to develop in all its fulness her great talent, that of loving. And when does she love more highly than in lavishing the whole superfluity of her developed feminine nature on the perfecting of her lover—for another woman? ”

“ The courage to construct one's own opinion in everything that makes the essential worth of life, but chiefly in one's religious belief, the power to express it, the will of making some sacrifice for it, all these give man a new share of civilisation and culture. As long as education and social life do not consciously forward this kind of courage, power, and will, the world will remain as it is, a parade ground of stupidity, crudeness, force, and selfishness, no matter whether radicals or conservatives, the democratic or aristocratic elements, have the upper hand. ”

“ Never do greater possibilities exist for the happiness both of the individuals and of the race than in a love which begins so early that the two can grow together in a common development; when they possess all the memories of youth as well as all the aims of the future in common; when the shadow of a third has never fallen across the path of either; when their children in turn dream of the great love they have seen radiating from their parents. ”

“ It will go on, as it is now, until mothers implant in the souls of their children the certainty, that the patriotism which, in the name of national interests, treads under foot the rights of other people, is to be condemned. The moment children undertake to act as adults, we shall see a harmony between ideas so taught and facts. When the conception of nationalism in the child's mind is freed from injustice and arrogance; when the idea of God is freed from its debased union with a selfish patriotism, then the idea of the soldier will be ennobled. ”

“ There is a charity which pours itself out like oil upon all wounds; there is sympathy in joy and sorrow between individuals; mutual help and mutual responsibility in society; a common feeling of rejoicing or suffering with our nation or with humanity at great moments. But all love from one human being to another which deserves that name, is in the highest degree individual; it is a selection, a separation. If it is not this, it is nothing. A woman chooses her children even when she chooses their father ”

“ It is true that she cannot efface her husband’s past. But she can create together with him a new and stronger generation. The man who knows what his beloved has suffered through his past; who has seen the wings of her courage lose something of their power, her confidence something of its smile, her joy something of its playfulness—he will in time teach his sons that a man may certainly become once more strong and healthy through happiness in love, but that he cannot win so beautiful and sure a happiness as self-control can prepare ”

“ In the school, the painful restlessness of the present "to get somewhere" will disappear entirely. In the calm, profound atmosphere of my school, the young generation will be trained to believe that the most important thing for man is not to do something, but to be something. It may be harsh to say that common natures are reckoned by what they do, noble natures by what they are; yet it is a deep truth, forgotten in this century of activity, in this age of woman. But it is bound to be remembered in the century of contemplation, in the century of the child. ”

“ Collective motherliness must act more as an eternal subterranean fire and less as the soaring but soon burnt-out flame of a sacrifice. It is not enough that the instinct of mutual help and sympathy is more immediate in woman than in man. Just as affection is not sufficient for the care of children, if insight into the vital laws of the body and soul is lacking, so also do women need an understanding of the biology and psychology of society in order to fulfil their individual tasks in national economy, and to understand the problems which are summed up under the name of social organisation. ”

“ Man feels more deeply than ever before that life gave him a poor portion, when his love has been nothing but sinking in an embrace. An ever greater number know that love is absorption into that spirit, in which one’s own finds its foothold without losing its freedom; the nearness of that heart which stills the disquiet in our own; that attentive ear which catches what is unspoken and unspeakable; the clear sight of those eyes which see the realisation of our best possibilities; the touch of those hands which, dying, we would feel closed on our own. ”