Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz SteinerFebruary 1861 – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect and esotericist. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth5 February 1861
CountryAustria
We must eradicate root and branch any fear and dread in our soul concerning the future that is coming towards us... We must develop composure with regard to all the feelings and sensations we have about the future; we must anticipate with absolute equanimity whatever may be coming towards us, thinking only that whatever it may be will be brought to us by the wisdom-filled guidance of the universe.
Matter is never without Spirit. Spirit is never without Matter.
Each one of us has it in themselves to be a free spirit, just as every rose bud has in it a rose.
We have seen that blood united to blood in the case of but remotely connected species of animals, kills; blood united to blood in the case of more closely allied species of animals does not kill. The physical organism of man survives when strange blood comes in contact with strange blood, ... but clairvoyant power perishes under the influence of this mixing of blood, or exogamy.
That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things.
Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.
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 time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge has now to arise from the materialistic grave.
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.
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.
You'll be able to gain insight and reach a conclusion only by applying the powers of mind, intellect, soul, heart, spirit, and imagination. This is what 'looking at something spiritually' really means.
The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole.
Geometry is knowledge that appears to be produced by human beings, yet whose meaning is totally independent of them.
Nothing is better for the human being than to add the right amount of honey to his food.