Rudolf Steiner Quotes

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Rudolf Steiner

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : February 27, 1861

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

Through systematic exercising of our thinking faculties, we can train ourselves for exact clairvoyance. Imaginative Knowledge is the first step in supersensible perception, and through it we reach the first element of the supersensible it is possible to reach, namely, the supersensible body that we bear within our earthly body in physical space.

Rudolf Steiner

We know even from ordinary life that we have to achieve a sufficient degree of attentiveness if we want to concentrate on an inner picture or an object of some kind; we must also have it in our power, though, to turn our soul away from something we have been concentrating on.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

While someone who is working out of ordinary science can speak from memory, the scientist of the spirit has to repeat the steps that once led him to the experience or discovery of which he is speaking. The whole process must be generated over again as a fresh, original experience.

Rudolf Steiner

In order to find our bearings in the spiritual worlds and see truly what is there for us to see, we need a further inner trait in our character, a quality I should like to term 'presence of mind.' In ordinary life, this is the trait we need when faced with a situation that requires us to make an immediate decision without hesitation.

Rudolf Steiner

We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment.

Rudolf Steiner

The knowledge we gain about the secrets of the spiritual world is at every hour, at every moment, of vital and profound significance for our souls; what seems to be remote from us personally is often what the soul inwardly needs.

Rudolf Steiner

Acquaintance with the human kingdom is limited: between death and a new birth - and this begins immediately or soon after death - the soul has contact and can make links only with those human souls, whether still living on earth or in yonder world, with whom he has already been karmically connected on earth in the last or in an earlier incarnation.

Rudolf Steiner

Links are formed karmically on the earth and then continue between death and a new birth. Those who are able to see into the spiritual world perceive how the dead person gradually makes more and more links - all of which are the outcome of karmic connections formed on earth.

Rudolf Steiner