Rudolf Steiner Quotes

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Rudolf Steiner

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : February 27, 1861

When you objectively observe the most spiritual area to which modern people devote themselves, the religions, ask yourself if the basis of modern culture, particularly in religion, is not human self-interest. It is typical of modern sermons that the preacher criticizes people for their selfishness.

Rudolf Steiner

Our thoughts do not actually exist; they are only pictures. A great error was made at the end of the last human developmental period when existence was equated with thinking. 'Cogito ergo sum' is the greatest error ever placed at the head of the modern world view.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

We have to push aside what generally concerns us most in our thought life, namely, the content of our thoughts, and learn instead to make conscious use of the element of will in our thinking.

Rudolf Steiner

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

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner