Rudolf Steiner
39 quotes
Biography
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian New Age guru, philosopher, occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant and speaker with the dead. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom.
"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."
"To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world."
"Live through deeds of love, and let others live understanding their unique intentions: this is the fundamental principle of free human beings."
"The fundamental maxim of free men is to live in love towards our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other person's will."
"Ethical individualism... is spiritualized theory of evolution carried over into moral life."
"Truth is a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality."
"Each individual is a species unto him/herself."
"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."
"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. 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."
"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."
"We shall not set up demands nor programmes, but simply describe the child-nature. (...) Vague and general phrases — ‘the harmonious development of all the powers and talents in the child,’ and so forth — cannot provide the basis for a genuine art of education. Such an art of education can only be built up on a real knowledge of the human being. Not that these phrases are incorrect, but that at bottom they are as useless as it would be to say of a machine that all its parts must be brought harmoniously into action. To work a machine you must approach it, not with phrases and truisms, but with real and detailed knowledge."
"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....Characteristics of race, tribe, ethnic group and gender are subjects for special sciences....But all these sciences cannot penetrate through to the special nature of the individual. Where the realm of freedom of thought and action begin, the determination of individuals according to generic laws ends."
"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."
"Steiner's incredible industry was self defeating. The mountain of titles, the avalanche of ideas, obscures the clarity and simplicity of his basic insight. Nevertheless, for the reader who declines to be discouraged, the rewards can be enormous. Once the basic insight has been grasped, we can begin to understand the source of those tremendous mental energies, and the sheer breadth of Steiner's vision. It hardly matters that there is a great deal that we may find unacceptable, or even repellent. What is so absorbing is to be in contact with a mind that was capable of this astonishing range of inner experience. Steiner was a man who had discovered an important secret; his books are fascinating because they contain continual glimpses of this secret. We may read them critically, wondering where Steiner was 'amplifying' genuine intuitions, and where he was amplifying his own dreams and imaginings. We may even conclude that Swedenborg, Blake, and Madame Blavatsky had all developed the same power of amplification, and that Steiner's visions of angelic hierarchies are no truer than Swedenborg's visions of heaven and hell, Blake's visions of the daughters of Albion, or Madame Blavatsky's visions of the giants of Atlantis. But all that is beside the point. The real point is that this faculty of amplification is our human birthright, and that anyone who can grasp this can learn to pass through that door to the inner universe as easily as he could stroll through the entrance of the British Museum."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The main difference in the effectiveness of teaching comes from the thoughts the teacher has had during the entire time of his or her existence and brings into the classroom. A teacher concerned with developing humans affects the students quite differently from a teacher who never thinks about such things."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people."
"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."
"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."
"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."