Rudolf Steiner Quotations

A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living.

May my soul bloom in love for all existence.

All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature.

The science of the future will be based on sympathetic vibrations.

The thing itself is one; the images are many. What leads to a perceptive understanding of the thing is not the focus on one image, but the viewing of many images together.

Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation.

Anthroposophie is not a religion but a tool for understanding of religions.

When sculpting the human figure in stone it is necessary to draw the whole form out of the content of the head.

The sensory world is the school, without which the human being would never come to the spirit.

A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert... gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture?

Goethe's thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose.

When man faces man the one attempts to put the other to sleep and the other continuously wants to maintain his uprightness. But this is, to speak in the Goethean sense, the archetypal phenomenon of social science. This sleeping-into we may call the social principle, the social impulse of the new era: we have to live over into the other; we have to dissolve with our soul into the other.

The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality.

If man wants to obtain knowledge of the greatness and happiness of these worlds, then is nothing else possible than that he also will be introduced to the dangerous, with the fearfulness that they contain. One is not possible without the other.

The outer world, with all its phenomena, is filled with divine splendour, but we must have experienced the divine within ourselves, before we can discover it in our environment

When we feel an obligation to test the things we say and to find the boundaries within which what we say has validity, then we are contributing to a real inner consolidation of our human feeling for existence.

It is the death of present art when it returns again and again to the model. Use of the model is only an intermediate stage in artistic development. Create out of a living spirituality to overcome everything naturalistic.

Grateful for his mistakes, man should be the gods, because by overcoming the faults the stronger force is developed.

It is important that we discover an educational method where people learn to learn and go on learning their whole lives

One can only understand history and all of social life, including today’s social life, if one pays attention to people’s racial characteristics. And one can only understand all that is spiritual in the correct sense if one first examines how this spiritual element operates within people precisely through the color of their skin.

These fourteen phases from full moon to new also have their result, and for the Egyptian consciousness this result was achieved through Isis. These fourteen phases are ruled by Isis.

Our task is to educate the human being in such a way that he or she can bring to expression in the right way that which is living in the whole human being, and on the other side that which puts him/her into the world in the right way.

The student of mathematics must get rid of all arbitrary thinking and follow purely the demands of thought. In thinking in this way, the laws of the spiritual world flow into him. This regulated thinking leads to the most spiritual truths.

People who are unable to use their hands skillfully for all kinds of work, will not become good thinkers and will behave awkwardly in life. It is not the head alone, but the whole human being that is a logician. Activities demanding manual and bodily skill, such as knitting, leads to the enhancement of the faculty of judgment. This faculty is actually developed least of all by exercises in logic.

Ultimately all knowing, from the highest to the lowest, is the result of experience; it arises on the way of experiences.

We differ from one another in our individual gifts which, however, belong to our inner nature.

Again and again one can listen: this is my opinion, I think this or that... As if it matters, what one or the other thinks! The point is much more to what the truth is!

If we can simply distinguish between the different successive stages of evolution, it is possible to see primeval events within the earthly events of the present.

It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all.

In diabetes mellitus the case is as follows: the ego-organization, as it submerges in the astral and etheric realm, is so weakened that it can no longer effectively accomplish its action upon the sugar-substance. The sugar then undergoes the processes in the astral and etheric realms which should take place in the ego-organization.... From all this we see that a real healing process for diabetes mellitus can only be initiated if we are in a position to strengthen the ego-organization of the patient.

You catch a fairly young field-vole and flay it... We take the skin, when Venus stands in the sign of the scorpion, and combust the skin... Now take the ash, which you got this way, and pepper it out on the fields.

When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever used, our prayer is a cry to the divine to come to us and fill us with its power.

Just as an age was ready to receive the Copernican theory of the universe, so is our own age ready for the ideas of reincarnation and karma to be brought into the general consciousness of humanity. And what is destined to happen in the course of evolution will happen no matter what powers rise up against it.

Everyday something must be achieved inwardly.

We find the instrument for the Knowledge of God in ourselves But we find God everywhere.

Die Kunst ist ewig, ihre Formen wandeln sich. (The art is eternal, their shapes are changing.)

The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world.

For every step in spiritual perception, three steps are to be taken in moral development.

In very ancient times of human evolution upon earth, humanity's revelation in word and sound was not differentiated in song and speech, but they were one.

Seek the truly practical life, but seek it in such a way that it does not blind you to the spirit working in it. Seek the spirit, but seek it not out of spiritual greed, but so that you may apply it in the genuinely practical life.

When the human being sings he lends expression to the great wise ways in which the world was made.

All the great Founders of religions have been possessed of clairvoyant sight.

It naturally elevates the soul to feel this intimate relationship to it's primal ground...A man then feels himself truly at home, and whenever he is lifted up through music he can say to himself: "Yes, you come from other worlds, and in music you can experience your native place."

Thoughts that deny reincarnation are transformed in the next life into an inner unreality, an inner emptiness of life; this inner unreality and emptiness are experienced as torment, as disharmony.

Acquisition of [higher] knowledge is not the end, but the means to the end; the end consists of the attainment, thanks to this knowledge of the higher worlds, of greater and truer self-confidence, a higher degree of courage, and a magnanimity and perseverance such as cannot, as a rule, be acquired in the lower world.For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character.

Not that which is inspires the creation, but that which may be; not the actual, but the possible.

...the worlds represent increasing phases of densification, the involuting descent of spirit into matter, where the way becomes harder and longer...

Man is not a being who stands still, he is a being in the process of becoming. The more he enables himself to become, the more he fulfills his true mission.

Our egoism gains nothing from acts of love, but the world gains all the more. Esotericism tells us that love is to the world what the Sun is for outer life. No soul could thrive if love departed from the world. Love is the “moral” Sun of the world.

Truth is a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves.

Our highest endeavour must be to develop individuals who are able out of their own initiative to impart purpose & direction to their lives.

Where the realm of freedom of thought and action begin, the determination of individuals according to generic laws ends.

The common trait of all evil is nothing other than egoism... Basically all human evil comes from what we call the selfishness.

If a child has been able in his play to give up his whole loving being to the world around him, he will be able, in the serious tasks of later life, to devote himself with confidence and power to the service of the world.

Heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility.

When the spirit most closely approaches the physical earth, then we have the perception of fragrance.

Our task is to harvest from the mortal world fruits for the immortal.

For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character

Intuition is the conscious experience - in pure spirit - of a purely spiritual content.

Anthroposophy does not want to impart knowledge. It seeks to awaken life.

Intuition is for thinking what observation is for perception. Intuition & observation are sources of knowledge.

When you try to do one step forward to attain knowledge about the hidden truths, then do the same time three steps forward to perfect your character.

Where God's presence is no longer a tenable proposition and where his absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable.

The higher worlds are around us. These worlds are not only heavenly worlds, not only worlds of happiness, though paradise and happiness are in them, but they are also worlds that could be terrible for the people, by dangerous facts and creatures.

Sounds are the echo of the "Harmony of the Spheres" which man took into himself when he came down from the divine-spiritual world into the physical world.

Those who would know the world, seek first within your beings' depths; those who would truly know themselves, develop interest in the world.

Without common sense, all thine efforts are in vain.

If men had known how to permeate the soul with mathematics in the right way in the arithmetic lessons during these past years, we should not now have Bolshevism in Eastern Europe.

The stars once spoke to man. It is world destiny that they are silent now, but in their silence there grows and ripens what man speaks to the stars!

Knowledge of life in the astral world leads us to a conclusion of fundamental importance, namely that the physical world is the product of the astral world.

Every human being shall see in each and all of his fellow-men a hidden divinity... that every human being is made in the likeness of the Godhead. When that time comes there will be no need for any religious coercion; for then every meeting between one man and another will of itself be in the nature of a religious rite, a sacrament.

Most naughtiness arises because the children are bored and lack a relationship with the teacher.

Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe... Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst.

If there is something more powerful than destiny, this must be the human being who bears destiny unshaken.

Reverence awakens in the soul a sympathetic power through which we attract qualities in the beings around us, which would otherwise remain concealed.

If we do not believe within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve into something higher.

In order to approach a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad-Gita with full understanding it is necessary to attune our soul to it.

Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man's forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world.

What is necessary to keep providing good care to nature has completely fallen into ignorance during the materialism era.

To understand the nature of love – that is to be a true Christian.

Colour is the soul of Nature and of the entire cosmos...

In so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything.

All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts.

A race or nation stands so much the higher, the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type ... The evolution of man through the incarnations in ever higher national and racial forms is thus a process of liberation [leading to] an ideal future.

In the future every human shall see a hidden divinity in every fellow human.

There will be as much deceit and criminality in the world as there is lack of art.

I look at the bird in the cage and see the air, not only the air that is around the bird when it flies, but I see and feel the formative tendency of air in its form. When I do all this, then what lives in the forms becomes enlivened and spiritualized for me.

You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is as teacher.

Beauty is not the divine in a cloak of physical reality; no, it is physical reality in a cloak that is divine. The artist does not bring the divine on to the earth by letting it flow into the world; he raises the world into the sphere of the divine.

We must eradicate root and branch any fear and dread in our soul concerning the future that is coming towards us... We must develop composure with regard to all the feelings and sensations we have about the future; we must anticipate with absolute equanimity whatever may be coming towards us, thinking only that whatever it may be will be brought to us by the wisdom-filled guidance of the universe.

Matter is never without Spirit. Spirit is never without Matter.

Each one of us has it in themselves to be a free spirit, just as every rose bud has in it a rose.

We have seen that blood united to blood in the case of but remotely connected species of animals, kills; blood united to blood in the case of more closely allied species of animals does not kill. The physical organism of man survives when strange blood comes in contact with strange blood, ... but clairvoyant power perishes under the influence of this mixing of blood, or exogamy.

That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things.

Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.

We create the possibility for a better human form in our next life if during our jamaloca existence after death, when we still have an astral body, we can have memories connected with music.

When the human being hears music, he has a sense of wellbeing, because these tones harmonize with what he has experienced in the world of his spiritual home.

Every human being should show the greatest interest in beekeeping because our lives depend upon it.

The time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge has now to arise from the materialistic grave.

Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.