“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.”
The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 34), an essay of 1909.
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Rudolf Steiner 20
Austrian esotericist 1861–1925Related quotes

Speech at Jazz at Lincoln Centre; quoted on official website http://www.mozabintnasser.qa/en/Pages/ArticlePreview.aspx?ArticleGuid=de04d373-9eaa-46c8-9f4d-033ff7b8fe1f&Type=Speech# (May 16 2013)
Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Four

Address to his household, Yverdon, Switzerland, on his seventy-second birthday (1818-01-12)

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 149

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Thoughts on Education: Speeches and Sermons (1902)
Source: Philosophical Sketches (1962), Ch. 5, p. 94

Commencement speech, Stanford University (2007-06-17)
Speeches and lectures

"Foreword to an Exhibit: I" (1944)
Context: Art is a mystery.
A mystery is something immeasurable.
In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable; and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn’t matter a very good God damn...