Rudolf Steiner Quotes

Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another the most varied opinions can be reconciled - thus one of the most important tasks for humankind today and in the future is that we should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of development is empty.

To be free is to be capable of thinking one's own thoughts - not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality.

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.

Receive the children in reverence, educate them in love, and send them forth in freedom.

The heart of the Waldorf method is that education is an art-it must speak to the child's experience. To educate the whole child, his heart and his will must be reached, as well as the mind.

When human beings meet together seeking the spirit with unity of purpose then they will also find their way to each other.

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.

We are fully human only while playing, and we play only when we are human in the truest sense of the word.

To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.

May my soul bloom in love for all existence.

If a child has been able in his play to give up his whole loving being to the world around him, he will be able, in the serious tasks of later life, to devote himself with confidence and power to the service of the world.

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.

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.

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

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

The smallest thing in its rightful place can lead to the highest goals.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

We must eradicate root and branch any fear and dread in our soul concerning the future that is coming towards us... We must develop composure with regard to all the feelings and sensations we have about the future; we must anticipate with absolute equanimity whatever may be coming towards us, thinking only that whatever it may be will be brought to us by the wisdom-filled guidance of the universe.

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.

Each individual is a species unto him/herself.

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.

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.

It is important that we discover an educational method where people learn to learn and go on learning their whole lives

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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