Top 120 Rudolf Steiner Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “If I meet other people and criticize their weaknesses, I rob myself of higher cognitive power. But if I try to enter deeply and lovingly into another person’s good qualities, I gather in that force.”

— Rudolf Steiner

102. “The thinker seeks the laws of phenomena, and strives to penetrate by thinking what he experiences by observing. Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we again find the unity out of which we had separated ourselves. We shall see later that this goal can be reached only if the task of the research scientist is conceived at a much deeper level than is often the case.”

— Rudolf Steiner

103. “He who is unwilling to trust to the power of thinking cannot, in fact, enlighten himself regarding higher spiritual facts.”

— Rudolf Steiner

104. “The heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility. You can only acquire right knowledge when you have learnt to esteem it. Man has certainly the right to turn his eyes to the light, but he must first acquire this right.”

— Rudolf Steiner

105. “When the spirit most closely approaches the physical earth, then we have the perception of fragrance.”

— Rudolf Steiner

106. “The teacher, as we know, can confer upon the pupil no powers which are not already latent within him, and his sole function is to assist in the awakening of slumbering faculties. But what he imparts out of his own experience is a pillar of strength for the one wishing to penetrate through darkness to light.”

— Rudolf Steiner

107. “When sculpting the human figure in stone it is necessary to draw the whole form out of the content of the head.”

— Rudolf Steiner

108. “Ultimately all knowing, from the highest to the lowest, is the result of experience; it arises on the way of experiences.”

— Rudolf Steiner

109. “Man is already weak at the moment he searches for laws and rules according to which he shall think and act. Out of his own being the strong individual controls his way of thinking and doing.”

— Rudolf Steiner

110. “The true occult scientist does not stand aloof from the world, but is a lover of reality, because he does not desire to enjoy the unseen in a remote dream-world, but finds his happiness in bringing to the world ever fresh supplies of force from the invisible sources from whence this very world is derived, and from which it must be continually fructified.”

— Rudolf Steiner

111. “The possibility of acquiring the art of writing may be withheld from someone through poverty, or through the conditions of civilization into which he is born; but for the attainment of knowledge and proficiency in the higher worlds, there is no obstacle for those who earnestly seek them.”

— Rudolf Steiner

112. “Goethe’s thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose.”

— Rudolf Steiner

113. “It is the death of present art when it returns again and again to the model. Use of the model is only an intermediate stage in artistic development. Create out of a living spirituality to overcome everything naturalistic.”

— Rudolf Steiner

114. “In the future every human shall see a hidden divinity in every fellow human.”

— Rudolf Steiner

115. “Grateful for his mistakes, man should be the gods, because by overcoming the faults the stronger force is developed.”

— Rudolf Steiner

116. “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.”

— Rudolf Steiner

117. “There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists – all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands.”

— Rudolf Steiner

118. “The thing itself is one; the images are many. What leads to a perceptive understanding of the thing is not the focus on one image, but the viewing of many images together.”

— Rudolf Steiner

119. “Thoughts that deny reincarnation are transformed in the next life into an inner unreality, an inner emptiness of life; this inner unreality and emptiness are experienced as torment, as disharmony.”

— Rudolf Steiner

120. “All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts.”

— Rudolf Steiner

121. “If men had known how to permeate the soul with mathematics in the right way in the arithmetic lessons during these past years, we should not now have Bolshevism in Eastern Europe.”

— Rudolf Steiner

122. “Little is accomplished if one tries to understand these words theoretically. Much more can be gained when one creates sacred moments in life when one is willing to energetically fill one’s soul with the living content of such words.”

— Rudolf Steiner

123. “But all those who had made themselves comfortable in the physical world experienced this fading away of consciousness in the spiritual world. It was no fairy tale but plain truth, that the initiates in the Eleusinian.”

— Rudolf Steiner

124. “These two thoughts are, first, that behind the visible world there is another, the world invisible, which is hidden from the senses and also from thought that is fettered by these senses; and secondly, that it is possible for man to penetrate into that unseen world by developing certain faculties dormant within him.”

— Rudolf Steiner

125. “The essential characteristic of the fourth period is that, by the exclusion of the soul from direct communion with the psycho-spiritual world, the human faculties of intelligence and feeling were thereby strengthened and invigorated. The souls whose powers of intelligence and feeling had at that time developed to a great extent as the result of former incarnations, carried over with them the fruits of this development into their incarnations during the fifth period.”

— Rudolf Steiner

126. “In ancient times, anterior to our history, the temples of the spirit were also outwardly visible; today, because our life has become so unspiritual, they are not to be found in the world visible to external sight; yet they are present spiritually everywhere, and all who seek may find them.”

— Rudolf Steiner

127. “If we can simply distinguish between the different successive stages of evolution, it is possible to see primeval events within the earthly events of the present.”

— Rudolf Steiner

128. “It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all.”

— Rudolf Steiner

129. “Above all, it is imperative to extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for the attainment of higher knowledge. It must be clearly realized that a start has to be made with the thoughts and feelings with which we continually live, and that these feelings and thoughts must merely be given a new direction. Everyone must say to himself: “In my own world of thought and feeling the deepest mysteries lie hidden, only hitherto I have been unable to perceive them.”

— Rudolf Steiner

130. “What is it that arises in modern people in an Ahrimanic form? It is his knowledge of the outer world. There is nothing more ahrimanic than this knowledge of the material world, for it is sheer illusion.”

— Rudolf Steiner

131. “What to them is known as practical thought or thinking consists in following the example of some authority whose ideas are accepted as a standard in the construction of some object. Anyone who thinks differently is considered impractical because this thought does not coincide with traditional ideas.”

— Rudolf Steiner

132. “These are two poles in the soul’s life: loss of self in what one is contemplating and self-willed assertion of what lies within the self. These are two great opposites. If you wish to attain real knowledge and permeate yourself with wisdom, self-will is lethal. In ordinary life, we know self-will only as prejudice – and prejudices always destroy higher insight.”

— Rudolf Steiner

133. “The student is told to set apart moments in his daily life in which to withdraw into himself, quietly and alone. He is not to occupy himself at such moments with the affairs of his own ego. This would result in the contrary of what is intended. He should rather let his experiences and the messages from the outer world re-echo within his own completely silent self. At such silent moments every flower, every animal, every action will unveil to him secrets undreamt of.”

— Rudolf Steiner

134. “The pyramids will perish in the course of the centuries but the ideas which gave them birth will develop onwards. The cathedral of today will take another form. Raphael’s pictures will fall into dust but the soul of Raphael and the ideas which his creations represent will be living powers forever. The Art of today will be the Nature of tomorrow and will blossom again in her. Thus does Involution become Evolution.”

— Rudolf Steiner

135. “It would be an error to wish to spread Christianity from a center in Asia, where other peoples are still settled, and Buddhism would be equally false for the European population. No religious view is right if it is not suited to the innermost needs of the time, and such a view will never be able to give a cultural impulse.”

— Rudolf Steiner

136. “If a man makes his life desolate by losing touch with the unseen, he not only destroys in his inner self something, the decay of which may eventually drive him to despair, but through his weakness he constitutes a hindrance to the evolution of the whole world in which he lives.”

— Rudolf Steiner

137. “You can get an idea of human nature only when you can see the relationship of the individual human being to the whole cosmos.”

— Rudolf Steiner

138. “Thought must be permeated with feeling; otherwise it will not pass into the realm of soul and it will be stillborn thought.”

— Rudolf Steiner

139. “It does not matter if what I think differs from what the other person thinks. What matters is that, as a result of what I can contribute to the conversation, the other discovers what is right out of themselves.”

— Rudolf Steiner