Ellen Key Quotes

I have a great relationship with animals, and with children. I get to their level. I try to see the way a child looks at the world, it's hugely different.

I try to listen to my children. I try to change with my children.

My grandmother had a great saying. It always stuck with me: 'People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.' They've got to see it and feel it. And it's for real. And that's all. Be who you are.

Other species help children develop empathy.

I love children. I'd prefer to be around children much more than adults, actually. And I like animals, too. I'm just really into beings who are at ease with themselves.

Young people want you to be real with them.

When I talk to kids, I'm really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It's almost like we're friends. Because a friend listens.

Kids are the most genuine thing to me: everything they say and do, they mean it.

My world is not spectacle and explosion. It's two people talking.

The sincere alone can recognize sincerity.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

I've spent my life trying to make things simpler. Because I find ultimately that complicated doesn't reach the heart.

He just explained that he just wanted to help people and that was his way of helping people of, you know, being someone that he wasn't and trying to connect with somebody on a different level too and help 'em out.

I would rather be a swineherd, understood by the swine, than a poet misunderstood by men.

All men are children, and if you understand that, a woman understands everything.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

You've seen things through my eyes.

Children ask better questions than adults. "May I have a cookie?" "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow say?" are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than "Where's your manuscript?" "Why haven't you called?" and "Who's your lawyer?"

In the true man there is a child concealed who wants to play.

I think people relate to the music because I have a sense of empathy, and I think I have a good understanding about relationships, and I talk about them in a real, honest way

Taxi drivers used to ask me what kind of music I did and I'd say, well, it's kind of jazz, soul, classical - but that makes no sense to anyone. Now I say I just write my own songs. I thought I had to help people get me, but I don't think they need to be spoon-fed. If you connect with me that is cool. I don't need the whole world to feel like I am a soul angel.

Dali Lama said, 'when you open the heart of the person with humor, you can tell him the most truth. But if you tell him truth without humor, the heart closes.'

It takes skill to be real. Time to heal each other