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

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

Ambition has developed into a passion which drives women, as well as men, to great works -- and small deeds. Formerly competitors in the race for men, they are now competing in the race for social tasks and distinctions.

When, in any ethical department, unity is attained between outer demands and inner desires, between nature and conscience, between the needs of society and the individual, the moral formula is void because inner necessity then makes it psychically and physically impossible to break the outer law. Thus, true morality is attained.

The young must be prepared to experience innumerable disappointments and yet not fail.

War can be prevented only by broad-minded statesmanship -- a statesmanship that understands how to enlist people's interests in a leading cause.

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.

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.

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

When it comes to the application to life of existing laws and morals, woman, because of her willing receptiveness, her elasticity and adaptability combined with her power of tenacious retention, has exerted an influence, the value of which is too vast to be measured.

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

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.

What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of nature and recognized that the great secret of education lies hidden in the maxim, 'Do not educate'?

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

The mother is the most precious possessions of the nation, so precious that society advances its highest well-being when it protects the functions of the mother.

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.

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 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.

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.