Rudolf Steiner Quotes & Sayings

The heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility. You can only acquire right knowledge when you have learnt to esteem it. Man has certainly the right to turn his eyes to the light, but he must first acquire this right. — Rudolf Steiner

When we raise ourselves through meditation to what unites us with the spirit, we quicken something within us that is eternal and unlimited by birth and death. Once we have experienced this eternal part in us, we can no longer doubt its existence. Meditation is thus the way to knowing and beholding the eternal, indestructible, essential centre of our being. — Rudolf Steiner

The idea of the freedom of the human will has found enthusiastic supporters and stubborn opponents in plenty. There are those who, in their moral fervor, label anyone a man of limited intelligence who can deny so patent a fact as freedom. Opposed to them are others who regard it as the acme of unscientific thinking for anyone to believe that the uniformity of natural law is broken in the sphere of human action and thinking. One and the same thing is thus proclaimed, now as the most precious possession of humanity, now as its most fatal illusion. — Rudolf Steiner

Love starts when we push aside our ego and make room for someone else. — Rudolf Steiner

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

Colour is the soul of Nature and of the entire cosmos ... — Rudolf Steiner

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

The sun with loving light makes bright for me each day, the soul with spirit power gives strength unto my limbs. In sunlight shining clear I revere, Oh God, the strength of humankind, which thou has planted in my soul, that I may with all my might, may love to work and learn. From thee stream light and strength to thee rise love and thanks. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

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

Live through deeds of love, and let others live with tolerance for their unique intentions. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

Anthroposophy is not a game, nor just a theory; it is a task that must be faced for the sake of human evolution. — Rudolf Steiner

In the future no human being is to find peace in the enjoyment of happiness if others beside him are unhappy. — Rudolf Steiner

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 — Rudolf Steiner

To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

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? — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

In an epoch of criticism ideals are lowered; other feelings take the place of veneration, respect, adoration, and wonder. Our own age thrusts these feelings further and further into the background, so that they can only be conveyed to man through his every-day life in a very small degree. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

I ask you to write this deeply into your souls ... the materialistic culture ... is now on the way to its close. — Rudolf Steiner

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." — Rudolf Steiner

There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists - all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands. — Rudolf Steiner

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

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

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

Thinking ... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

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

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

Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another the most varied opinions can be reconciled - thus one of the most important tasks for humankind today and in the future is that we should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of development is empty. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

A real medicine can only exist when it penetrates into a knowledge which embraces the human being in respect to body, soul and spirit. — Rudolf Steiner

Feelings are for the soul what food is for the body. — Rudolf Steiner

Only when I follow my love for my objective is it I myself who act. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

Without common sense, all thine efforts are in vain. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

The smallest thing in its rightful place can lead to the highest goals. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

The Greeks had the greatest architectonic gifts. Every art has its climax at some point, and here architecture had its high point. Modeling and painting reached their climax elsewhere. Despite the gigantic pyramids, the most wonderful architecture appears in the Greek temple. — Rudolf Steiner

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

If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense ... Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. In the case of fair people, less nourishment is driven into the eyes and hair; it remains instead in the brain and endows it with intelligence. Brown- and dark-haired people drive the substances into their eyes and hair that the fair people retain in their brains. — Rudolf Steiner

Whoever seeks higher knowledge must create it for himself. He must instill it into his soul. It cannot be done by study; it can only be done through life. Whoever, therefore, wishes to become a student of higher knowledge must assiduously cultivate this inner life of devotion. Everywhere in his environment and his experiences he must seek motives of admiration and homage. If I meet a man and blame him for his shortcomings, I rob myself of power to attain higher knowledge; but if I try to enter lovingly into his merits, I gather such power. The student must continually be intent upon following this advice. The spiritually experienced know how much they owe to the circumstance that in face of all things they ever again turn to the good, and withhold adverse judgement. But this must not remain an external rule of life; rather it must take possession of our innermost soul. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

He who perceives in the spiritual world must know that at times Imaginations are assigned to him which at first he must forego understanding; he must receive them as Imaginations and let them ripen in his soul as such. In spiritual experience, much depends on a man having the patience to make observations, at first to simply accept them, and to wait with understanding them until the right moment arrives. — Rudolf Steiner

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

The heart of the Waldorf method is that education is an art-it must speak to the child's experience. To educate the whole child, his heart and his will must be reached, as well as the mind. — Rudolf Steiner

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! — Rudolf Steiner

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

Matter is never without Spirit. Spirit is never without Matter. — Rudolf Steiner

Spiritual science attempts to speak about non-sensory things in the same way that the natural sciences speak about sense-perceptible things ... No one can ever deny others the right to ignore the supersensible, but there is never any legitimate reason for people to declare themselves authorities, not only on what they themselves are capable of knowing, but also on what they suppose cannot be known by any other human being. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

We are fully human only while playing, and we play only when we are
human in the truest sense of the word. — Rudolf Steiner

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

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

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. — Rudolf Steiner

He remembers that it was said to him, "Our ancestors were animal forms." But he does not remember that these forms were gods. This is the psychological basis for the emergence of Darwinism. — Rudolf Steiner

For human beings, love is the most important fruit of experience in the sense world. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

You'll be able to gain insight and reach a conclusion only by applying the powers of mind, intellect, soul, heart, spirit, and imagination. This is what 'looking at something spiritually' really means. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

Geometry is knowledge that appears to be produced by human beings, yet whose meaning is totally independent of them. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

Each individual is a species unto him/herself. — Rudolf Steiner

We must be educated in inner human modesty, so we can recognize that we are not, even for a moment, complete as human beings. Instead, we continue to develop from birth until death. We must recognize that every day of life has a special value, that it is not without purpose that we must learn to live through our thirties right after we have just gone through our twenties. We need to learn that each new day and each new year offers continual revelation. — Rudolf Steiner

All knowledge pursued merely for the enrichment of personal learning and the accumulation of personal treasure leads you away from the path; but all knowledge pursued for growth to ripeness within the process of human ennoblement and cosmic development brings you a step forward. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

Today, we have knowledge of many, many things and the relations among human beings have multiplied ad infinitum. But we live in cities that are like deafening factories in awful Babels, with nothing to remind us of our inner world. Our communion with this inner world is not through contemplation but through books. We have passed from intuition into intellectualism. — Rudolf Steiner

For what lies inside the human being is the whole spiritual cosmos in condensed form. In our inner organism we have an image of the entire cosmos. — Rudolf Steiner

We have to live over into the other; we have to dissolve with our soul into the other. — Rudolf Steiner

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

The myth says that Osiris was cut into fourteen pieces and was buried in fourteen graves. Here in this profound myth we have a wonderful reference to the cosmic event. The fourteen aspects of the moon are the fourteen pieces of the dismembered Osiris. 10 The complete Osiris is the whole moon-disk. — Rudolf Steiner

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

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. — Rudolf Steiner

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

Man is effective in the world not only through what he does, but above all through what he is. — Rudolf Steiner

Reverence, enthusiasm, and a sense of guardianship, these three are actually the panacea, the magical remedy, in the soul of the educator and teacher. — Rudolf Steiner

Wherever love and compassion are active in life, we can perceive the magic breath of the spirit blowing through the sense world. — Rudolf Steiner

Nothing is better for the human being than to add the right amount of honey to his food. — Rudolf Steiner

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

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. — Rudolf Steiner