Top 244 Quotes & Sayings by Rudolf Steiner - Page 4

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

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.

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

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

Without common sense, all thine efforts are in vain.

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.

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."

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Spirit is never without matter, matter is never without spirit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

To understand the nature of love — that is to be a Christian!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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