The greatest initiate of the 20th Century and one of history’s most original thinkers, Rudolf Steiner’s work is largely unknown in the world today. He was an Austrian philosopher, social thinker, architect and esotericist who gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher. The rest of his life was devoted to building up a complete science of the spirit, to which he gave the name Anthroposophy. Foremost amongst his discoveries was his direct experience of the reality of the Christ, which soon took a central place in his whole teaching. The many books and lectures which he published set forth the magnificent scope of his vision. From 1911 he turned also to the arts — drama, painting, architecture, eurythmy — showing that many creative forming powers can be drawn from spiritual vision.
(1861-1925)
– Rudolf Steiner Quotes –
A healthy social life arises when the whole community finds its reflection in the mirror of person’s soul, and when the virtue of each person lives in the whole community.
~ Rudolf Steiner
What is independent of our bodily makeup we are all individually made; each one of us is his or her own self, an individual.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Those who judge human beings according to generic characteristics only reach the boundary, beyond which people begin to be beings whose activity is based on free self-determination.
~ Rudolf Steiner
To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.
~ Rudolf Steiner
The fact that we all bear a human countenance and encounter one another as external, physical human beings… this makes us equal on this footing.
~ Rudolf Steiner
You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is as teacher.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Let us assume that we as contemporary human beings lay a fish on the table or put a bird in a cage. Then we look at the fish and the bird outwardly with our senses. But we are so egotistical in our way of knowing that we hold fast to what is immediately in front of us. We become unegocentric in our way of knowing when we not only see the fish in water or the bird in the air, but when we can see in their forms, that the fish is an animal of the water and through water, and that the bird is an animal of the air and through the air…. I proceed in this way from a mere unrefined perception to a perception-if I am not too lazy-that allows me to see the water with the fish I’m observing on the table.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Each individual is a species unto him/herself.
~ Rudolf Steiner
What is essential in the machine is only the interaction of its parts. The unifying principle that governs that interaction does not exist in the object itself but outside it as a plan in the head of its builder. Only the most extreme shortsightedness can deny that the difference between an organism and a mechanism is precisely the fact that in a machine the determining principle governing the interrelationship of its parts is external (and abstract), whereas in an organism it assumes a real existence in the object itself.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Live through deeds of love, and let others live with tolerance for their unique intentions.
~ Rudolf SteinerA 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.
~ Rudolf Steiner
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.
~ Rudolf Steiner
In the human organism we cannot connect the head arbitrarily to some other body part. Rather, we must proceed from the neck, then to the shoulders, then to the thorax, etc. Just as the organism must be considered as a whole, so must the kind of thinking I call morphological thinking be inwardly mobile. It must be so inwardly mobile—living in the medium of time and not space—that it elicits one form (Gestalt) out of the other. This thinking differentiates in an organic way; it continually grows.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe.
~ Rudolf Steiner
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.
~ Rudolf Steiner
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.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Live through deeds of love, and let others live with tolerance for their unique intentions.
~ Rudolf Steiner
To speak with Goethe—whoever thrusts forth a concept to delimit the richness of life has no sense for the fact that life shapes itself in relations. These relations take different directions and work differently in different directions. It is of course easier to let a schematic concept take the place of a view of full life; we can easily judge schematically with schematic concepts. We live, however, through such a process in empty abstractions. Human concepts become such abstractions when we believe we can treat them in our intellect the way things [in the world] interact with each other. But concepts are much more like images or pictures that we take of a thing from different sides.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Where the realm of freedom of thought and action begin, the determination of individuals according to generic laws ends.
~ Rudolf Steiner
The basic mistake of many scientific endeavors in the present is that they believe they are presenting pure experience, while in reality they are reading out the concepts that they put into their experience in the first place.
~ Rudolf Steiner
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.
~ Rudolf Steiner
If we want to develop inner truthfulness, we must never go further than facts of the outer world speak to us. And we must, strictly speaking, attempt to formulate our words in such a way that we only confirm the facts of the outer sensory world….
~ Rudolf Steiner
May my soul bloom in love for all existence.
~ Rudolf Steiner
In our ordinary thinking everything is arranged spatially. Consider that even time is expressed by the movements of the clock. The same process in fact is also contained in our physical formulae. In short, we must come to the conclusion that ordinary thinking is a combining way of thinking, one that collects scattered elements. We use this way of thinking in our ordinary sound conditions of life, and in ordinary science.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Receive the children in reverence; educate them in love; let them go forth in freedom.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Two things are possible: One can stop at the results of natural science or one can investigate how scientists proceed in order to arrive at scientific results…. One path of overcoming materialism in our times is to understand the methods of scientific research.
~ Rudolf Steiner
People become scientific materialists because they do not—or only to a small degree—concern themselves with the manner in which research proceeds…. They don’t move to Goetheanism, that is, to the consideration of the methods of research.
~ Rudolf Steiner
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.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Goethe’s thinking was mobile. It followed the whole growth process of the plant and followed how one plant form is a modification of the other.
~ Rudolf Steiner
Goethe’s thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. Thereby his concepts became, if I may put it this way, intimately adapted to the process that plant nature itself goes through.”
~ Rudolf Steiner
We differ from one another in our individual gifts which, however, belong to our inner nature.
~ Rudolf Steiner
When we as human beings confront a simple fact, we can rigorously attempt to form a mental picture that exactly corresponds to this fact. This mental picture is then true. Or, we can-whether due to inexactness, lassitude, or even an aversion to truth, that is, out of falseness-form a mental picture that is not connected with the fact, that does not fit the fact….
~ Rudolf Steiner
