Zitat des Tages von 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.
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.
It is the forces of the universe that make human beings fall ill. Having learnt to recognize how sun qualities and moon qualities live in plants, animals and minerals, we discover how we can find counterforces and also individual natural forces that point us towards medicines for specific internal illnesses.
The subject of the lesson itself should not become more important that the underlying basis. Drawing thus provides first the written forms of letters and then their printed forms. Based on drawing, we build up to reading.
Anyone who believes that it is possible to educate the will without cultivating the insight that enlivens it is succumbing to illusion. Clear-sightedness on this point is a task for present-day pedagogy, but it can come only from a life-filled understanding of the whole human being.
Nature has endowed us with needs; among them are some that she leaves to our own activity to satisfy. Abundant as are the gifts she has bestowed upon us, still more abundant are our desires. We seem born to be dissatisfied.
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.
In order for the students' development and the outer development of civilization to coincide, we need a faculty whose interest is not limited to specialized educational practices. Rather, this faculty must be fully involved in the broader aspects of life.
Oriental reality is called ideology in Europe and America, and Western ideology is called reality in the Orient. Those viewpoints eat into people's souls and form two distinct kinds of beings.
A feeling for equal rights for other human beings cannot exist in adults if a feeling for authority is not implanted in them during childhood. Otherwise, adults will never become mature enough to recognize the rights of others.
Our thoughts do not actually exist; they are only pictures. A great error was made at the end of the last human developmental period when existence was equated with thinking. 'Cogito ergo sum' is the greatest error ever placed at the head of the modern world view.
The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world. Religion, art, and science follow, one and all, this aim.
One can ascend to a higher development only by bringing rhythm and repetition into one's life. Rhythm holds sway in all nature.
Failure to take note of the fact that the character of twentieth-century humanity differs from that of humanity in the fifteenth century, let alone before and at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, is to sleep through the process of world evolution.
We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people.
What is of the nature of spirit and soul must be gleaned from facts belonging to the spirit and soul; we shall then know that in the living thinking which is liberated from the will, a life-germ has been discerned which passes through the gate of death, goes through the spiritual world after death, and afterwards returns again to earthly life.
The Egyptian was the reverse of a theorist or mere thinker. He wanted to perceive with his senses how the soul took its way from the dead body into higher realms - he wanted to have this constructed before him.
Knowledge has value only insofar as it contributes to the all-round development of the whole nature of man.
The essential and living elements in our architectural activities stem from what was implanted in us during Old Saturn evolution.
Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, insofar as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit.
When we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it, then we have architecture.
We have to push aside what generally concerns us most in our thought life, namely, the content of our thoughts, and learn instead to make conscious use of the element of will in our thinking.
In our will, there lives something which is perpetually observing us inwardly. It is easy to look upon this inner spectator as something intended to be taken pictorially; the spiritual investigator knows it to be a reality, just as sense-perceptible objects are realities.
When children draw or do rudimentary painting, the whole human being develops an interest in what is being done. This is why we should allow writing to develop from drawing.
In the life of our organism, we are continually dealing with a development of force followed by a state of equilibrium. Of course, the human being has no conscious knowledge of what is really going on within him, but what takes place is so infinitely wise that the cleverness of the human ego is nothing by comparison.
Whereas what man can learn about the world through his senses and through the intellect which relies upon sense-observation may be called 'anthropology,' what the spiritual man within us can know may be called 'anthroposophy.'
We must assimilate the thought that life between death and a new birth is so constituted that everything we do awakens an echo in the environment.
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.
I have often called attention to the fact that walking through the streets in the Middle Ages was a different experience from nowadays. Right and left, there were house facades that were built out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of the person who had made it.
If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the 'strongest' of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it?
May my soul bloom in love for all existence.
A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth.
Descriptions of inner, spiritual processes are much more liable to misunderstanding than descriptions of events in the physical world. Such misunderstandings arise easily because the life of the soul is in constant movement and because we fail to bear in mind that the life of the soul is very different from life in the physical world.
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.
Only man is permitted to live without rhythm in order that he can become free. However, he must of his own accord bring rhythm again into the chaos.
You must take a definite idea, set it in the centre of your thinking, and then logically arrange your furthest thoughts in such a way that they are all closely linked with the original idea. Even if you do this for only a minute, it can be of great importance for the rhythm of the physical and etheric bodies.
