Rudolf Steiner citations

“You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you do and not upon who you are.”

“Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves.”

“To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.”

“If we do not believe within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve into something higher.”

“The art is eternal, their shapes are changing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Live through deeds of love, and let others live with tolerance for their unique intentions.”

“Each individual is a species unto him/herself.”

“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.”

“In order to approach a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad-Gita with full understanding it is necessary to attune our soul to it.”

“The time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge has now to arise from the materialistic grave.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Only to the extent that a man has emancipated himself…from all that is generic, does he count as a free spirit within a human community. No man is all genus, none is all individuality.”