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.
The main difference in the effectiveness of teaching comes from the thoughts the teacher has had during the entire time of his or her existence and brings into the classroom. A teacher concerned with developing humans affects the students quite differently from a teacher who never thinks about such things.
Above all, we must be conscious of the primary pedagogical task, namely that we must first make something of ourselves so that a living inner spiritual relationship exists between the teacher and the children.
Receive the children in reverence, educate them in love, and send them forth in freedom.Collection: Children
To be free is to be capable of thinking one's own thoughts - not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality.Collection: Spiritual
Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility—these three forces are the very nerve of education.Collection: Responsibility
Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another the most varied opinions can be reconciled - thus one of the most important tasks for humankind today and in the future is that we should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of development is empty.Collection: Love Is
To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.Collection: Real
The heart of the Waldorf method is that education is an art-it must speak to the child's experience. To educate the whole child, his heart and his will must be reached, as well as the mind.Collection: Art
If a child has been able in his play to give up his whole loving being to the world around him, he will be able, in the serious tasks of later life, to devote himself with confidence and power to the service of the world.Collection: Children
It is important that we discover an educational method where people learn to learn and go on learning their whole livesCollection: Educational
When human beings meet together seeking the spirit with unity of purpose then they will also find their way to each other.Collection: Unity
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.Collection: Teacher
The smallest thing in its rightful place can lead to the highest goals.Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Reflection
We must eradicate root and branch any fear and dread in our soul concerning the future that is coming towards us... We must develop composure with regard to all the feelings and sensations we have about the future; we must anticipate with absolute equanimity whatever may be coming towards us, thinking only that whatever it may be will be brought to us by the wisdom-filled guidance of the universe.Collection: Thinking
Intuition is for thinking what observation is for perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
Reverence, enthusiasm, and a sense of guardianship, these three are actually the panacea, the magical remedy, in the soul of the educator and teacher.Collection: Teacher
Our highest endeavour must be to develop individuals who are able out of their own initiative to impart purpose & direction to their lives.Collection: Purpose
Wherever love and compassion are active in life, we can perceive the magic breath of the spirit blowing through the sense world.Collection: Compassion
You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you do and not upon who you are.Collection: Teacher
People who are unable to use their hands skillfully for all kinds of work, will not become good thinkers and will behave awkwardly in life. It is not the head alone, but the whole human being that is a logician. Activities demanding manual and bodily skill, such as knitting, leads to the enhancement of the faculty of judgment. This faculty is actually developed least of all by exercises in logic.Collection: Exercise
Music is the expression of the will of nature while all other arts are expressions of the idea of nature.Collection: Art
In a community of human beings working together, the well-being of the community will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of the work he has himself done; i.e., the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow workers, and the more his own requirements are satisfied, not out of his own work done, but out of work done by the others.Collection: Community
In the future every human shall see a hidden divinity in every fellow human.Collection: Divinity
A real medicine can only exist when it penetrates into a knowledge which embraces the human being in respect to body, soul and spirit.Collection: Real
Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.Collection: Men
We have to live over into the other; we have to dissolve with our soul into the other.Collection: Communication
Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideasCollection: Eye
If there is something more powerful than destiny, this must be the human being who bears destiny unshaken.Collection: Powerful
Where the realm of freedom of thought and action begin, the determination of individuals according to generic laws ends.Collection: Determination
Just as an age was ready to receive the Copernican theory of the universe, so is our own age ready for the ideas of reincarnation and karma to be brought into the general consciousness of humanity. And what is destined to happen in the course of evolution will happen no matter what powers rise up against it.Collection: Karma
Without common sense, all thine efforts are in vain.Collection: Inspirational
Every human being shall see in each and all of his fellow-men a hidden divinity... that every human being is made in the likeness of the Godhead. When that time comes there will be no need for any religious coercion; for then every meeting between one man and another will of itself be in the nature of a religious rite, a sacrament.Collection: Religious
For every step in spiritual perception, three steps are to be taken in moral development.Collection: Spiritual
The time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge has now to arise from the materialistic grave.Collection: Realizing
Only when I follow my love for my objective is it I myself who act.Collection: Objectives
Those who would know the world, seek first within your beings' depths; those who would truly know themselves, develop interest in the world.Collection: Knowledge
If man wants to obtain knowledge of the greatness and happiness of these worlds, then is nothing else possible than that he also will be introduced to the dangerous, with the fearfulness that they contain. One is not possible without the other.Collection: Greatness
Sounds are the echo of the "Harmony of the Spheres" which man took into himself when he came down from the divine-spiritual world into the physical world.Collection: Spiritual
The higher worlds are around us. These worlds are not only heavenly worlds, not only worlds of happiness, though paradise and happiness are in them, but they are also worlds that could be terrible for the people, by dangerous facts and creatures.Collection: People
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.Collection: Thinking
The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole.Collection: Real
Intuition is the conscious experience - in pure spirit - of a purely spiritual content.Collection: Spiritual
Spiritual science attempts to speak about non-sensory things in the same way that the natural sciences speak about sense-perceptible things...No one can ever deny others the right to ignore the supersensible, but there is never any legitimate reason for people to declare themselves authorities, not only on what they themselves are capable of knowing, but also on what they suppose cannot be known by any other human being.Collection: Spiritual
All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts.Collection: Real
To understand the nature of love — that is to be a Christian!Collection: Christian