"May wisdom shine through me

May love glow within me

May strength imbue me

May I be transformed!

Into helper of humankind

A servant of sacred things

Selfless and true."

—philosopher, anthroposopher, esotericist, polymath, Rudolf Steiner walked out of life on this day, ninety-nine years ago, in 1925

“It has to be realized that essentially the universe contains nothing but states of consciousness.”

“The way to the heart is through the head. Love is no exception. Whenever it is not merely the expression of bare sexual instinct, it depends on the conception we form of the loved one. And the more idealistic these conceptions are, just so much the more blessed is our love. Here too, thought is the father of feeling. It is said that love makes us blind to the failings of the loved one. But this can be expressed the other way round, namely, that it is just for the good qualities that love opens the eyes. Many pass by these good qualities without noticing them. One, however, perceives them, and just because he does, love awakens in his soul. What else has he done but conceived of what hundreds have failed to see? Love is not theirs, because they lack the conception.”

“The question is not whether I can carry out a decision once made, but how the decision comes about within me.”

“The free and active working, straight from the inner resources of the human being, is a perfectly elementary experience of self-observation. It cannot be argued away; rather must we harmonise it with our insight into the universal causation of things within the order of Nature.”

"But one must pay attention to such things if one wants to have a concept of how there is a life in the language itself in which we are involved. In penetrating more deeply into this language the possibility will open out for an imaginative feeling and perception. Nowadays there is very much that fights against this learning of the imaginative from speech, because since languages have recently become international, men have with a certain justification acquired many languages, or at least several, up to a certain point. This acquisition of several languages has not yet driven the deeper aspect of the matter to the surface, but actually only the superficial."

“If we understand one another at a level higher than speech by means of deeper elements in the soul—by means of thoughts carried by feeling, warmed by the heart—then we have an international medium of understanding, but we need a heart for this for it to come into being. We must find the path to the spirit of man at a level higher than that of speech. The search for a language of thought, as well as all other matters connected with philosophy, education, religion, and art—that is the signification of the Anthroposophical Movement in the historical present... The language striven for by Anthroposophy will move in the pure element of light that passes from soul to soul, from heart to heart—and this is more than a figure of speech...”

“Try to form a really heroic concept of loyalty. What people call loyalty is so evanescent. Try making this your loyalty: You will find that there are fleeting moments in your experience with others when they seem suffused and illumined by the archetypes of their own spirits. And then other periods come--perhaps quite long ones--when their beings are as though clouded over. You can learn to say at such a time: 'The spirit makes me strong. I think of my friend's archetype, which I once glimpsed. No deception, no outer appearance, can ever wrest this image from me.' Struggle ceaselessly to keep this vision. The struggle itself is loyalty. In the effort to be loyal in this sense, human beings come close to their fellow human beings with the strength and in the attitude of a guardian angel.”

"God is magically concealed in the world. And you need His own force in order to find Him. This force you must awaken within yourself."

“To understand the nature of love—that is to be a Christian!”

“What then has arisen under the bourgeoisie in place of social science? Something of which people are very proud and never tired of praising, namely, modern sociology. Now this modern sociology is the most nonsensical product of culture that could possibly have arisen; for it sins against all the most elementary requirement for a social science. This sociology seeks to be great by taking no account of anything that could lead to social will, social impulse, merely noting historically and statistically the so-called sociological facts, to prove, or so it appears, that the human being is a kind of social animal living within a community. It has furnished strong evidence of this, unconsciously it is true, furnished it by not advancing anything but the most insipid sociological views which are the common property of everyone — mere trivialities. Nowhere is there the will to discover social laws and how they must effect the social will of man.”

"...so that one no longer looks up to the moon and stares at it as a great skittles-ball with which mechanical forces have moved skittles in the cosmos and which from these irregularities has acquired wrinkles, and so on — but recognises what the moon indicates."

“We have only to remember, of course, in what surroundings this thinking took place. It did not take place in the midst of the noisy world as it does today. It took place in the cloister or somewhere far from the world. It was a thinking that was absorbed in the life of thought and was also able, through other circumstances, to arrive at a pure thought-technique. As a matter of fact it is very difficult today to build up such a pure activity of thought. For no sooner do we seek to make public any such thought-activity, in which the sole aim is to allow thought to follow thought in accordance with their content, than along come stupid people, raising every conceivable objection and interposing their violent prejudices. In such circumstances that inner quiet is very soon lost to which the thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were able to devote themselves. For in the life of their day they were not compelled to pay such disproportionate attention to the opposition of the uneducated.”