Rudolf Steiner > Quotes

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

“Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility—these three forces are the very nerve of education.”
― Rudolf Steiner

“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.”
― Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos

“You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you do and not upon who you are.”
― Rudolf Steiner

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

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

“Feelings are for the soul what food is for the body.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation

“Die Kunst ist ewig, ihre Formen wandeln sich.
(The art is eternal, their shapes are changing.)”
― 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, Rhythms of Learning

“That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things.”
― Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science

“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, How to Know Higher Worlds

“for even the wisest can learn incalculably much from children.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“Some day, when I have grown sufficiently, I shall attain that which I am destined to attain,”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“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, Esoteric Cosmology

“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, How to Know Higher Worlds

“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, How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation

“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, How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation

“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, Egyptian Myths And Mysteries

“It cannot be repeated too often that this transformation does not alienate him from the world. He will in no way be estranged from his daily tasks and duties, for he comes to realize that the most insignificant action he has to accomplish, the most insignificant experience which offers itself to him, stands in connection with cosmic beings and cosmic events. When once this connection is revealed to him in his moments of contemplation, he comes to his daily activities with a new, fuller power. For now he knows that his labor and his suffering are given and endured for the sake of a great, spiritual, cosmic whole. Not weariness, but strength to live springs from meditation.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“The tranquility of the moments set apart will also affect everyday existence. In his whole being he will grow calmer; he will attain firm assurance in all his actions, and cease to be put out of countenance by all manner of incidents. By thus advancing he will gradually become more and more his own guide, and allow himself less and less to be led by circumstances and external influences. He will soon discover how great a source of strength is available to him in these moments thus set apart. He will begin no longer to get angry at things which formerly annoyed him; countless things he formerly feared cease to alarm him. He acquires a new outlook on life.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“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, Egyptian Myths And Mysteries

“We suffer because with every inner and outer suffering we eliminate one of our faults and become transformed into something better.”
― Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life: Practical Training in Thought - Overcoming Nervousness - Facing Karma - The Four Temperaments

“There is, in truth, no difference between esoteric knowledge and all the rest of man's knowledge and proficiency. This esoteric knowledge is no more of a secret for the average human being than writing is a secret for those who have never learned it.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“Consider the following case. Someone is traveling by railway; his mind is busy with one thought; suddenly is thought diverges; he recollects an experience that befell him years ago and interweaves it with his present thought. He did not notice that in looking through the window he had caught sight of a person who resembled another intimately connected with the recollected experience. He remains conscious, not of what he saw, but of the effect it produced, and thus believes that it all came to him of its own accords. How much in life occurs in such a way! How great is the part played in our life by things we hear and learn, without our consciously realizing the connection! Someone, for instance, cannot bear a certain color, but does not realize that this is due to the fact that the schoolmaster who used to worry him many years ago wore a coat of that color. Innumerable illusions are based upon such associations. Many things leave their mark upon the soul while remaining outside the pale of consciousness.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“Truthfulness, uprightness, and honesty are in this connection creative forces, while mendacity, deceitfulness, and dishonesty are destructive forces.”
― Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds

“In the universe we have not to do with repetitions, each time that a cycle is passed, something new is added to the world's evolution and to at its human stage of development”
― Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life: Practical Training in Thought - Overcoming Nervousness - Facing Karma - The Four Temperaments

“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, Egyptian Myths And Mysteries

“It would be an error to wish to spread Christianity from a center in Asia, where other peoples are still settled, and Buddhism would be equally false for the European population. No religious view is right if it is not suited to the innermost needs of the time, and such a view will never be able to give a cultural impulse.”
― Rudolf Steiner, Egyptian Myths And Mysteries