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.

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.

Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

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.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

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.

The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.

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.

All thoughtful persons perceive that the ideas of the morality of sexual relations upheld by the religions and laws of the Western nations are in our time undergoing a radical transformation.

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.

At present, the most effective way of preventing war would be for statesmen to direct politics so as to support a sound nationalism. This leads to concordance between people of kindred race and languages, whereas the conquest and coercion of people of different race and language inevitably lead to new wars.

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.

Children must be impressed with the fact that the greatest heroes are those who fight to help others, not those who fight for power or glory. They must be made to understand that victory does not prove that the thing fought for is right, nor that defeat proves that a cause is wrong.

Christianity is sustained by the knowledge that the object of man's life on earth is his development as an eternal being. Therefore, none of his expressions of life can be an end in itself, but must serve a higher purpose than the earthly life and happiness of the individual - or even than that of the race.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!

Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life's gracious gifts to its elect.

Happiness lies so far from man, but he must begin by daring to will it.

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!

If, in the coming thousand years, a feminine culture shall really supplement the masculine, then this will be exactly in the measure in which women have the courage to create and to act as most feminists now do not even dare think.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house management, dress-making, etc.

Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the whole, the experience that the activity of the soul obeys the law of least resistance has been verified even in regard to women's social morals. As a rule, these have been focused on the family and on charity - among other reasons, because woman's sense of duty seldom finds means of expression in other directions.

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.

Only by keeping oneself in constant process of growth, under the constant influence of the best things in one's own age, does one become a companion halfway good enough for one's children.

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.

Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.

Socialism and the woman movement are two mighty streams which drag along with them great parts of the firm formations which they touch.

Tenderness has created the first 'social order' - that of the mother with her offspring. Through motherliness, woman later makes her great contributions to civilization.

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.