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Anyone who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems.

Ellen Key

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Ellen Key
Age: 76 †
Born: 1849
Born: December 11
Died: 1926
Died: April 26
Critic
Feminist
Pedagogue
Suffragette
Translator
Writer
Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
Would
Tasks
Virgin
Despair
Virgins
Probably
Existing
Education
Forest
Felling
Anyone
Systems
Reformer
School
Forests
Paralysis
Feel
Attempt
Reformers
Feels
Task
Confronted

More quotes by Ellen Key

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Art, that great undogmatized church.
Ellen Key
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Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
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The socially pernicious, racially wasteful, and soul-withering consequences of the working of mothers outside the home must cease. And this can only come to pass, either through the programme of institutional upbringing, or through the intimate renaissance of the home.
Ellen Key
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All philanthropy — no age has seen more of it than our own — is only a savoury fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer.
Ellen Key
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the higher the development of women, the more they suffer from the 'patriotic' mandate to bear many children to replace the nation's losses. For they know that, from the point of view of their personal development as well as that of the race, fewer but better children are to be preferred.
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The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Ellen Key
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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
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The genius of happiness is still so rare. 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.
Ellen Key
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Love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy.
Ellen Key
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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
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When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
Ellen Key
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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
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Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content.
Ellen Key
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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
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A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.
Ellen Key
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The belief that we some day shall be able to prevent war is to me one with the belief in the possibility of making humanity really human.
Ellen Key
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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
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Nothing would more effectively further the development of education than for all flogging pedagogues to learn to educate with the head instead of with the hand.
Ellen Key