Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker. He is the founder of anthroposophy, a spiritual movement that generated many practical endeavors, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture and anthroposophical medicine.

Sourced

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

• Live through deeds of love, and let others live with tolerance for their unique intentions.
  • Philosophy of Freedom

• 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.
  • Truth and Knowledge, preface

• Each individual is a species unto him/herself.
  • Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos (1904)

• 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.
  • Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (1924)

• 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.
  • Lecture from August 30, 1921, trans. Craig Holdrege

• 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.
  • Curative Education, lect. 2

• 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.
  • Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. A Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4), Hudson (1894)/1995.

• ... as regards ... what is independent of our bodily makeup we are all individually made; each one of us is his or her own self, an individual. With the exception of the far less important differences that show up as racial or national differences ... but which are (if you have a sense for this you cannot help noticing it) mere trifles by comparison with differences in individual gifts and skills: with the exception of these we are all equal as human beings ... as regards our external, physical humanity. We are equal as human beings, here in the physical world, specifically in that we all have the same human form and all manifest a human countenance. The fact that we all bear a human countenance and encounter one another as external, physical human beings... this makes us equal on this footing. We differ from one another in our individual gifts which, however, belong to our inner nature.
  • Education as a Force for Social Change (in GA 192), Hudson 1997, lecture of 23 April 1919.

Unsourced

• A healthy social life arises when the whole community finds its reflection in the mirror of person's soul, and when the virtue of each person lives in the whole community.
  • Steiner's "fundamental maxim of social life"

• Receive the children in reverence; educate them in love; let them go forth in freedom.
  • Rudolf Steiner

Quotes about Rudolf Steiner

• [Rudolf Steiner] taught a number of things in which I have long believed, among them that it is no longer possible in our time to offer a religion full of unsubstantiated miracles, but rather that religion must be a science which can be proven. It is no longer a question of belief, but of knowing. Further, we acquire knowledge of the spiritual world through steady, conscious, systematic thinking.
  • Selma Lagerlöf (1859-1940), 1909 Nobel Literature Laureate

• When it falls to the lot of his first biographer to recount the life of this great man, then, and only then, will the full extent of Rudolf Steiner's achievements and their, in the highest human sense, creative nature be revealed. Then men will view with profound amazement ... what irreplaceable strength and support [humanity] has received from this man's mind while this age hurtles onwards into the terrifying wasteland of materialism.
  • Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914), German author and poet

• One of us, I no longer remember which one, began to speak of the spiritual decline of culture as the fundamental, unremarked problem of our times. We realized that both of us were occupied with this question; neither had expected this of the other. A lively discussion ensued. Each of us experienced from one another that we had taken on the same mission in life: to strive for the rise of true culture enlivened and formed by humane ideals, and to stimulate people to become truly thoughtful human beings. We took leave of one another in this consciousness of solidarity....We each followed one another's work. To take part in Rudolf Steiner's high flight of thought of spiritual science was not given to me. I know, however, that in this he lifted up and renewed many people, and his disciples attained exceptional accomplishments in many realms. I have rejoiced at the achievement which his great personality and his profound humanity have brought about in the world.
  • Albert Schweizer

• Steiner offers us a world view that gives a reasonable place to the development of man in the spiritual area. And if you earlier in a serious way could take a materialistic position and explain the meaning of life and society on a physical-material basis, that is not any more possible today. Today, we need other views, we must develop our spiritual essence and finally ask the question about the meaning of life.
  • Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986)

• Steiner (1861-1925) was an extraordinary pioneer ... and one of the most comprehensive psychological and philosophical visionaries of his time ... his overall vision is as moving as one could imagine.
  • Ken Wilber

• ... meeting a man of such a magnetic personality at so early a stage, when he yielded himself to the younger people around him in friendship and without dogmatizing, was an incalculable gain for me. In his fantastic and at the same time profound knowledge I realized that true universality, which we, with the overweening pride of high school boys, thought we had already mastered, was not to be gained by flighty reading and discussion, but only by years of burning endeavor.
  • Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)

• The scriptures of Steiner's church include Cosmic Memory, Karmic Relationships, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rosicrucian Esotericism, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric, and a hundred or so other volumes with confusing titles and bewildering contents. For the Anthroposophist- and even for the open-minded sceptic- they are full of important insights. But their sheer quantity constitutes an enormous obstacle between Steiner and the intelligent reader. 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.
  • Colin Wilson, Rudolf Steiner: The Man and his Vision

Note: Most of the quotes in this section can be found here