Top 244 Quotes & Sayings by Rudolf Steiner - Page 3

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Everyday something must be achieved inwardly.

Each individual is a species unto him/herself.

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

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

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.

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

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 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

Actually, every human being should show the greatest interest in this subject, because, much more than you can imagine, our lives depend upon beekeeping.

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

Acquisition of knowledge is not the end, but the means to the end; the end consists in 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you do and not upon who you are.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 what lies inside of man is the whole spiritual cosmos in condensed form. In man's inner organism we have an image of the entire cosmos.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 stars spoke once to man. It is world destiny That they are silent now. To be aware of the silence Can become pain for earthly man. But in the deepening silence There grows and ripens What man speaks to the stars.

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.