Rudolf Steiner

The Anthroposophical Society is different from other societies in that it will not tolerate any figments of the imagination in its organization but is constructed on the basis of reality.

— Rudolf Steiner

In raising children, we need to continuously keep in mind how we can best create the most favorable environment for their imitative behavior. Everything done in the past regarding imitation must become more and more conscious and more and more consciously connected with the future.

— Rudolf Steiner

I have often called attention to the fact that walking through the streets in the Middle Ages was a different experience from nowadays. Right and left, there were house facades that were built out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of the person who had made it.

— 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

Live through deeds of love, and let others live understanding their unique intentions: this is the fundamental principle of free human beings.

— Rudolf Steiner

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.

— Rudolf Steiner

Ethical individualism... is spiritualized theory of evolution carried over into moral life.

— Rudolf Steiner

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.

— Rudolf Steiner

Each individual is a species unto him/herself.

— Rudolf Steiner

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.

— 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. 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

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

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.

— Rudolf Steiner

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.

— Rudolf Steiner

If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the 'strongest' of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it?

— Rudolf Steiner

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.

— Rudolf Steiner

When we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it, then we have architecture.

— Rudolf Steiner

May my soul bloom in love for all existence.

— Rudolf Steiner

Architecture produces a musical mood in our inner being, and we notice that even though the elements of architecture and music appear to be so alien in the outer world, through this musical mood engendered in us, our experience of architecture brings about a reconciliation, a balance between these two elements.

— Rudolf Steiner

If you observe children with sufficient objectivity as they grow into the world, then you will perceive that children's temporal bodies are still not fully connected with the spirit-soul. The task of education, understood in a spiritual sense, is to bring the soul-spirit into harmony with the temporal body.

— Rudolf Steiner

In the life of our organism, we are continually dealing with a development of force followed by a state of equilibrium. Of course, the human being has no conscious knowledge of what is really going on within him, but what takes place is so infinitely wise that the cleverness of the human ego is nothing by comparison.

— Rudolf Steiner

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.

— Rudolf Steiner

In raising children, we need to continuously keep in mind how we can best create the most favorable environment for their imitative behavior. Everything done in the past regarding imitation must become more and more conscious and more and more consciously connected with the future.

— Rudolf Steiner

Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling, and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfill the same purpose.

— Rudolf Steiner

Knowledge has value only insofar as it contributes to the all-round development of the whole nature of man.

— Rudolf Steiner

Architecture produces a musical mood in our inner being, and we notice that even though the elements of architecture and music appear to be so alien in the outer world, through this musical mood engendered in us, our experience of architecture brings about a reconciliation, a balance between these two elements.

— Rudolf Steiner

Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling, and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfill the same purpose.

— Rudolf Steiner

We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people.

— Rudolf Steiner

Normally, adults process their waking experiences during sleep. Children cannot yet carry their waking experiences into sleep. Thus, in sleep, they settle into the general cosmic order without taking their physical experience into the cosmic order.

— Rudolf Steiner

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.

— Rudolf Steiner

Prenatal education can only be an unconscious result of what the parents, particularly the mother, do. If, until the child is born, the mother acts in such a way that she expresses what is morally and intellectually correct, then what she accomplishes in her own continuing education will transfer to the child.

— Rudolf Steiner