Receive the children in reverence, educate them in love, and send them forth in freedom.
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.
When we feel an obligation to test the things we say and to find the boundaries within which what we say has validity, then we are contributing to a real inner consolidation of our human feeling for existence.
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.
Anthroposophie is not a religion but a tool for understanding of religions.
We differ from one another in our individual gifts which, however, belong to our inner nature.
All the great Founders of religions have been possessed of clairvoyant sight.
Without common sense, all thine efforts are in vain.
Our task is to harvest from the mortal world fruits for the immortal.
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.
In so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything.
For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character.
Grateful for his mistakes, man should be the gods, because by overcoming the faults the stronger force is developed.
Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.
Feelings are for the soul what food is for the body.
All knowledge pursued merely for the enrichment of personal learning and the accumulation of personal treasure leads you away from the path; but all knowledge pursued for growth to ripeness within the process of human ennoblement and cosmic development brings you a step forward.
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.
Today, we have knowledge of many, many things and the relations among human beings have multiplied ad infinitum. But we live in cities that are like deafening factories in awful Babels, with nothing to remind us of our inner world. Our communion with this inner world is not through contemplation but through books. We have passed from intuition into intellectualism.
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.
In an epoch of criticism ideals are lowered; other feelings take the place of veneration, respect, adoration, and wonder. Our own age thrusts these feelings further and further into the background, so that they can only be conveyed to man through his every-day life in a very small degree.