Rudolf Steiner

We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people.

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

You cannot be an educator or a teacher without relating to children with full insight. Their urge to imitate has been transformed into a receptivity based on a natural and uncontested relationship of authority, and you must take this into account in the broadest possible sense.

The most important thing in arithmetic is not the shapes of the numbers but the reality living in them. This living reality has much more meaning for the spiritual world than what lives in reading and writing.

Adults need to live in a society that is economically social, governmentally democratic, and culturally free.

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.

A philosophy of freedom must set out from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience of thinking that a human being discovers his own self, finds his bearings as an independent personality.

If spiritual science is to do the same for spirit that natural science has done for nature, it must investigate quite differently from the latter. It must find ways and means of penetrating into the sphere of the spiritual, a domain which cannot be perceived with outer physical senses nor apprehended with the intellect which is bound to the brain.

In ancient, prehistoric times, the temples of the spirit were outwardly visible, but today, when our life has become so unspiritual, they no longer exist where we can see them with our physical eyes. Yet spiritually they are still present everywhere, and whoever seeks can find them.

It is possibly not very helpful to our inner life to ponder a great deal on how the external world is reflected in our soul. By doing so, we do not get beyond a shadowy picture of the world of mental images in ourselves.

You must always be open to new experiences; by this means, your physical and etheric bodies will be brought into a condition which may be compared with the contented mood of a brooding hen.

Oriental reality is called ideology in Europe and America, and Western ideology is called reality in the Orient. Those viewpoints eat into people's souls and form two distinct kinds of beings.

Only man is permitted to live without rhythm in order that he can become free. However, he must of his own accord bring rhythm again into the chaos.

We must carry out exercises in thought and exercises in will if the portals of the supersensible world are to open for us. It is this world that we must enter if we want to know the eternal aspect of ourselves and of the universe.

When we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it, then we have architecture.

The whole of ancient astrology owed its origin to conversation with the cosmic intelligences. But by the time of the first centuries after the rise of Christianity, ancient astrology - that is to say, conversation with cosmic intelligences - was a thing of the past.

Gothic architecture requires individual craftsmanship. The wish to create an enclosed world for the congregation gives rise in Gothic architecture to the need to create something wherein the activity of the congregation plays a part.

Failure to take note of the fact that the character of twentieth-century humanity differs from that of humanity in the fifteenth century, let alone before and at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, is to sleep through the process of world evolution.

In raising children, we need to continuously keep in mind how we can best create the most favorable environment for their imitative behavior. Everything done in the past regarding imitation must become more and more conscious and more and more consciously connected with the future.

We must guard against disrespectful, disparaging, and criticizing thoughts. We must try to practice reverence and devotion in our thinking at all times.

In earthly life, a person can conceal whether evil or good is active in his soul. After death, this is no longer possible. The spirit form presents after death the physiognomical expression of what the person was on earth.

The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world. Religion, art, and science follow, one and all, this aim.

However superficial prevailing views of heredity seem to be, it must be admitted that a person is indeed the bearer of inherited characteristics. This is the one aspect. He must often battle against these inherited traits and rid himself of them in order to bring to fulfillment the talents laid into him before he entered earthly existence.

Descriptions of inner, spiritual processes are much more liable to misunderstanding than descriptions of events in the physical world. Such misunderstandings arise easily because the life of the soul is in constant movement and because we fail to bear in mind that the life of the soul is very different from life in the physical world.

However true it may be that we have estranged ourselves from Nature, it is nonetheless true that we feel we are in her and belong to her. It can be only her own working which pulsates also in us. We must find the way back to her again.

If I meet other people and criticize their weaknesses, I rob myself of higher cognitive power. But if I try to enter deeply and lovingly into another person's good qualities, I gather in that force.

The capacities by which we can gain insights into higher worlds lie dormant within each one of us.

A living art of teaching, one that rests on a true understanding of the human being, has a thread of strength running through it that stimulates individual students to participate so that it is not necessary to keep their attention through direct 'individualized' treatment.

Whereas what man can learn about the world through his senses and through the intellect which relies upon sense-observation may be called 'anthropology,' what the spiritual man within us can know may be called 'anthroposophy.'

When children draw or do rudimentary painting, the whole human being develops an interest in what is being done. This is why we should allow writing to develop from drawing.

If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the 'strongest' of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it?

What is attained by a developed thinking is not visions but spiritual sight of realities; what is attained by a developed will is not ordinary soul-experiences but the discovery of a consciousness different from the ordinary.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get away from it.

Immortality is the negation of death. We do not usually speak about innatality about having not yet been born yet this is something we would have to regard as the other aspect of the human soul. We are just as unborn as we are immortal.

Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling, and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfill the same purpose.

The strength people need to proceed along the path of human development can come only from the spiritual worlds.

You must take a definite idea, set it in the centre of your thinking, and then logically arrange your furthest thoughts in such a way that they are all closely linked with the original idea. Even if you do this for only a minute, it can be of great importance for the rhythm of the physical and etheric bodies.

When what we introduce into the children's world of ideas and feelings is in line with the direction of the developmental forces of a given stage of life, we strengthen the entire developing person in a way that remains a source of strength throughout that person's life.

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

Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, insofar as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit.

What is of the nature of spirit and soul must be gleaned from facts belonging to the spirit and soul; we shall then know that in the living thinking which is liberated from the will, a life-germ has been discerned which passes through the gate of death, goes through the spiritual world after death, and afterwards returns again to earthly life.

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

May my soul bloom in love for all existence.

Anyone who believes that it is possible to educate the will without cultivating the insight that enlivens it is succumbing to illusion. Clear-sightedness on this point is a task for present-day pedagogy, but it can come only from a life-filled understanding of the whole human being.

Just as future eclipses of the Sun and Moon are indicated in the present relations of those bodies, so are future earthly lives indicated in what now lives within us.

It should not be expected that what is spiritual can be brought before the eyes, before the senses. It must be experienced inwardly and spiritually.

By immersing ourselves with our consciousness in a supersensible world, we now learn a new kind of thinking, a new life of mental pictures, one that is not dependent on the nervous system in the way ordinary thinking is. We know that previously we have had to make use of our nervous system, but now we no longer need our brain.

I have often called attention to the fact that walking through the streets in the Middle Ages was a different experience from nowadays. Right and left, there were house facades that were built out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of the person who had made it.

All things which have a directing force here in the physical world cease to exist when one arrives in the imaginative world. If, on the physical plane, you imagine yourself to have done something you actually have not done, you will soon be persuaded by the facts of the physical world that this is not so. This is not the case in astral space.

Architecture produces a musical mood in our inner being, and we notice that even though the elements of architecture and music appear to be so alien in the outer world, through this musical mood engendered in us, our experience of architecture brings about a reconciliation, a balance between these two elements.

Esoteric or inner knowledge is no different from other kinds of human knowledge and ability. It is a mystery for the average person only to the extent that writing is a mystery for those who have not yet learned to write.

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

The Egyptian was the reverse of a theorist or mere thinker. He wanted to perceive with his senses how the soul took its way from the dead body into higher realms - he wanted to have this constructed before him.

A feeling for equal rights for other human beings cannot exist in adults if a feeling for authority is not implanted in them during childhood. Otherwise, adults will never become mature enough to recognize the rights of others.

The Oriental thinks everything in the sense-perceptible world is 'maya'; everything perceived by our senses and all thinking connected with sense perceptions is 'maya,' the great illusion. The only reality is the reality of the soul. What a human being achieves in his or her soul is reality.

Our task is to find teaching methods that continually engage the whole human being. We would not succeed in this endeavor if we failed to concentrate on developing the human sense of art.

A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth.

The subject of the lesson itself should not become more important that the underlying basis. Drawing thus provides first the written forms of letters and then their printed forms. Based on drawing, we build up to reading.

The essential and living elements in our architectural activities stem from what was implanted in us during Old Saturn evolution.

Learning certain things purely through memory is related to the developmental forces that are present between the sixth or seventh year and the fourteenth year of life. This quality of human nature is what mathematical instruction should be based on.

For the most part, people think in ordinary life without bringing order into their thoughts. The guiding principles and epochs of human development and planetary evolution, the great viewpoints which have been opened by the initiates, bring thought into ordered forms. All of this is a part of Rosicrucian training. It is called the Study.

The true teachers and educators are not those who have learned pedagogy as the science of dealing with children, but those in whom pedagogy has awakened through understanding the human being.

In the life of our organism, we are continually dealing with a development of force followed by a state of equilibrium. Of course, the human being has no conscious knowledge of what is really going on within him, but what takes place is so infinitely wise that the cleverness of the human ego is nothing by comparison.

Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.

It is not possible to educate the will and the healthy soul that underlies it unless we develop insights that awaken energetic impulses in the soul and will.

In our will, there lives something which is perpetually observing us inwardly. It is easy to look upon this inner spectator as something intended to be taken pictorially; the spiritual investigator knows it to be a reality, just as sense-perceptible objects are realities.

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

The realms of life are many. For each one, special sciences develop. But life itself is a unity, and the more deeply the sciences try to penetrate into their separate realms, the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the world as a living whole.

The vision of the human being is confined today to the physical body. One regards this as a reality; one cannot raise oneself to what is spiritual. The souls who now look upon their own physical bodies with their eyes, and are unable to rise to what is spiritual, were incarnated among earlier peoples as Greeks, as Romans, and as ancient Egyptians.

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 only knowledge which satisfies us is one which is subject to no external standards but springs from the inner life of the personality.

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.

You can go from object to object, from plant to plant, from animal to animal and regard them as symbols for the spiritual. In this way, you make your imaginative capacities fluid and release them from the sharp contours of sense perception.

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.

Nature has endowed us with needs; among them are some that she leaves to our own activity to satisfy. Abundant as are the gifts she has bestowed upon us, still more abundant are our desires. We seem born to be dissatisfied.

In order for the students' development and the outer development of civilization to coincide, we need a faculty whose interest is not limited to specialized educational practices. Rather, this faculty must be fully involved in the broader aspects of life.

Knowledge has value only insofar as it contributes to the all-round development of the whole nature of man.

We can find Nature outside us only if we have first learned to know her within us. What is akin to her within us must be our guide. This marks out our path of enquiry.

What the spiritual investigator has to do to acquire the faculty of looking into the spiritual world consists exclusively of processes of spirit and soul; they have nothing to do with changes in the body, nor with visions arising from an abnormal bodily life.

What the human being sees, what is poured into his environment, becomes a force in him. In accordance with it, he forms himself.

One can ascend to a higher development only by bringing rhythm and repetition into one's life. Rhythm holds sway in all nature.

By giving material expression to force-forms in space, the Greeks gave divine spiritual beings the opportunity of using these material forms. It is no figure of speech but a fact when we say that gods came down at that time into the Greek temples in order to be among human beings on the physical plane.

We will not find the inner strength to evolve to a higher level if we do not inwardly develop this profound feeling that there is something higher than ourselves.

Only a person who has passed through the gate of humility can ascend to the heights of the spirit.

You must learn to perceive as your self that which lies outside you. Looking only within oneself leads to a hardening in oneself, to a higher egotism.

In the very traits of his temperament, which have a considerable effect on his life of soul, a person bears within him qualities and impulses that have an obvious connection with those of his physical ancestors.