Our egoism gains nothing from acts of love, but the world gains all the more. Esotericism tells us that love is to the world what the Sun is for outer life. No soul could thrive if love departed from the world. Love is the “moral” Sun of the world.
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.
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.
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.
The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world.
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.
The sensory world is the school, without which the human being would never come to the spirit.
In very ancient times of human evolution upon earth, humanity’s revelation in word and sound was not differentiated in song and speech, but they were one.
Goethe’s thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose.
For every step in spiritual perception, three steps are to be taken in moral development.
There will be as much deceit and criminality in the world as there is lack of art.
Not that which is inspires the creation, but that which may be; not the actual, but the possible.
Beauty is not the divine in a cloak of physical reality; no, it is physical reality in a cloak that is divine. The artist does not bring the divine on to the earth by letting it flow into the world; he raises the world into the sphere of the divine.
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.
When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever used, our prayer is a cry to the divine to come to us and fill us with its power.
Everyday something must be achieved inwardly.
We find the instrument for the Knowledge of God in ourselves But we find God everywhere.
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.
When you try to do one step forward to attain knowledge about the hidden truths, then do the same time three steps forward to perfect your character.
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.