Rudolf Steiner quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

May my soul bloom in love for all existence.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe.

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.

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.

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

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

Each individual is a species unto him/herself.

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

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.

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

Everyday something must be achieved inwardly.

For every human illness, somewhere in the world there exists a plant which is the cure.

For every human illness, somewhere in the world there exists a plant which is the cure. I believe that there is a healing potential locked inside plants which is integral with their evolution, just as it is part of human evolution to learn to tap this wonderful gift of Nature.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

If humanity is to live in the future in a socially right way, humanity must educate its children in a socially right way.

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.

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.

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

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 a community of human beings working together, the well-being of the community will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of the work he has himself done; i.e., the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow workers, and the more his own requirements are satisfied, not out of his own work done, but out of work done by the others.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Music is the expression of the will of nature while all other arts are expressions of the idea of nature.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Receive the children in reverence, educate them in love, and send them forth in freedom.

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.

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.

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

The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory - disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

To be free is to be capable of thinking one's own thoughts - not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality.