Rudolf Steiner quotes

Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, and esotericist, best known as the founder of anthroposophy. His work influenced education, agriculture, and spiritual science, notably through the creation of Waldorf schools and biodynamic farming. He advocated for a holistic understanding of the human being and spiritual development. Here are 93 of his quotes:

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

May my soul bloom in love for all existence.

Rudolf Steiner

All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature.

Rudolf Steiner

Love starts when we push aside our ego and make room for someone else.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

Each individual is a species unto him/herself.

Rudolf Steiner

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

Rudolf Steiner

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

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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

Rudolf Steiner

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

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

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.

Rudolf Steiner

We can find Nature outside us only if we have first learned to know her within us. What is akin to her within us must be our guide. This marks out our path of enquiry.

Rudolf Steiner

A philosophy of freedom must set out from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience of thinking that a human being discovers his own self, finds his bearings as an independent personality.

Rudolf Steiner

When the human being hears music, he has a sense of wellbeing, because these tones harmonize with what he has experienced in the world of his spiritual home.

Rudolf Steiner