Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.
Knowledge has value only insofar as it contributes to the all-round development of the whole nature of man.
A living art of teaching, one that rests on a true understanding of the human being, has a thread of strength running through it that stimulates individual students to participate so that it is not necessary to keep their attention through direct 'individualized' treatment.
Through systematic exercising of our thinking faculties, we can train ourselves for exact clairvoyance. Imaginative Knowledge is the first step in supersensible perception, and through it we reach the first element of the supersensible it is possible to reach, namely, the supersensible body that we bear within our earthly body in physical space.
The Anthroposophical Society is different from other societies in that it will not tolerate any figments of the imagination in its organization but is constructed on the basis of reality.
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.
It is one of the sternest judgments confronting a human being after death that insofar as he is himself evil, he can see only what resembles himself because he can reproduce in his own being only the physiognomy of other evil people.
The whole of ancient astrology owed its origin to conversation with the cosmic intelligences. But by the time of the first centuries after the rise of Christianity, ancient astrology - that is to say, conversation with cosmic intelligences - was a thing of the past.
You can get an idea of human nature only when you can see the relationship of the individual human being to the whole cosmos.
If spiritual science is to do the same for spirit that natural science has done for nature, it must investigate quite differently from the latter. It must find ways and means of penetrating into the sphere of the spiritual, a domain which cannot be perceived with outer physical senses nor apprehended with the intellect which is bound to the brain.
While someone who is working out of ordinary science can speak from memory, the scientist of the spirit has to repeat the steps that once led him to the experience or discovery of which he is speaking. The whole process must be generated over again as a fresh, original experience.
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.
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.
The only knowledge which satisfies us is one which is subject to no external standards but springs from the inner life of the personality.
If you observe children with sufficient objectivity as they grow into the world, then you will perceive that children's temporal bodies are still not fully connected with the spirit-soul. The task of education, understood in a spiritual sense, is to bring the soul-spirit into harmony with the temporal body.
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.
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.
Acquaintance with the human kingdom is limited: between death and a new birth - and this begins immediately or soon after death - the soul has contact and can make links only with those human souls, whether still living on earth or in yonder world, with whom he has already been karmically connected on earth in the last or in an earlier incarnation.
Links are formed karmically on the earth and then continue between death and a new birth. Those who are able to see into the spiritual world perceive how the dead person gradually makes more and more links - all of which are the outcome of karmic connections formed on earth.
Immortality is the negation of death. We do not usually speak about 'innatality' - about having not yet been born - yet this is something we would have to regard as the other aspect of the human soul. We are just as unborn as we are immortal.
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.
You cannot be an educator or a teacher without relating to children with full insight. Their urge to imitate has been transformed into a receptivity based on a natural and uncontested relationship of authority, and you must take this into account in the broadest possible sense.
When we project the specific organization of the human body into the space outside it, then we have architecture.
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.
We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people.
Normally, adults process their waking experiences during sleep. Children cannot yet carry their waking experiences into sleep. Thus, in sleep, they settle into the general cosmic order without taking their physical experience into the cosmic order.
Prenatal education can only be an unconscious result of what the parents, particularly the mother, do. If, until the child is born, the mother acts in such a way that she expresses what is morally and intellectually correct, then what she accomplishes in her own continuing education will transfer to the child.
Just as future eclipses of the Sun and Moon are indicated in the present relations of those bodies, so are future earthly lives indicated in what now lives within us.
If I meet other people and criticize their weaknesses, I rob myself of higher cognitive power. But if I try to enter deeply and lovingly into another person's good qualities, I gather in that force.
We will not find the inner strength to evolve to a higher level if we do not inwardly develop this profound feeling that there is something higher than ourselves.