Ellen Key Marriage Quotations

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

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.

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.

The ever clearer consciousness that love can dispense with marriage, yet marriage cannot dispense with love, is already partially recognized by modern society, by the facility of divorce.

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.

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.

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.