In winter the whole surface of the Earth is reinvigorated. - Rudolf Steiner

Reverence must take hold of every soul that is to make progress in its development. - Rudolf Steiner

All desire to withdraw, to protect oneself from the influences of unavoidable world-karma, emanates from weakness. But it is Anthroposophy alone that can make the human heart and will vigorous enough to develop the force which arms and strengthens us in face of these influences. Any kind of advice to withdraw from modern life, or to engage in a sort of hothouse cultivation of the spiritual life, should never find favour in the sphere of our movement. - Rudolf Steiner

Sacrifice and becoming (germination of the new) — these two are intimately linked together in the Easter festival. - Rudolf Steiner

Many people ask "What shall I do? It is so obvious what one should do! One should open one's eyes! One's spiritual eyes to be sure. - Rudolf Steiner

Festivals are the commemoration of great Ideals, and Christmas is the birth feast of the very greatest Ideal before mankind, of that Ideal which man must strain every nerve to attain if he is to fulfil his mission. The birth festival of all that man can feel, perceive and will — such is Christmas when it is truly understood. - Rudolf Steiner

Fundamentally, the whole meaning and spirit of evolution rests on the fact, that we pass from taking, to giving. - Rudolf Steiner

The external physical light of the Sun, the physical forces of the Heavens, come down to the Earth in the spring. - Rudolf Steiner

Our value for the world must be seen to lie wholly in deeds of love - Rudolf Steiner

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. - Rudolf Steiner

To disseminate love over the earth in the greatest measure possible, to promote love on the earth — that and that alone is wisdom. - Rudolf Steiner

The soul is drawn by the strength of its reverence towards the eternal, with which it longs to unite itself.  - Rudolf Steiner

Below the Earth's surface, in winter, there is a tremendous reinforcement of the Earth's capacity to produce life. - Rudolf Steiner

If man's future evolution is to avoid being swept into total degeneracy, a true spiritual culture will have to enter ever more strongly into external life. - Rudolf Steiner

At this autumn festival of Michael there should grow in you everything that goes against love of ease, against anxiety, and makes for the unfolding of inner initiative and free, strong, courageous will. The Festival of strong will — that is how we should conceive of the Michael Festival. - Rudolf Steiner

We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people. - Rudolf Steiner

This limitation of interest to solely what people receive through their labour, instead of what they produce, is what poisons our entire economic life. - Rudolf Steiner

We must progress, from a material attitude which has entered and taken hold of all minds and hearts, towards a spiritual attitude. For, that renewal, which is necessary to counterbalance today's prosaic ways of life, can only be born out of the spirit. - Rudolf Steiner

If we rightly understand this festival we must say: That which we believe to be born anew symbolically every Christmas Night, is the human soul in its original nature, the childhood-spirit of man as it was at the beginning of earth-evolution; then it descended as a revelation from the heavenly heights. And when the human heart can become conscious of this reality, the soul is filled with the unshakable peace that can bear us to our lofty goals, if we are of goodwill. Mighty indeed is the word that can resound to us on Christmas Night, do we but understand its import. - Rudolf Steiner

The Christmas Festival is the Festival of the Holy Night, celebrated in the Mysteries by those who were ready for the awakening of the higher Self within them, or, as we should say in our time, those who have brought the Christ to birth within them. - Rudolf Steiner

The path to the peaks of knowledge and the path to the heights of compassion are one and the same. Only knowledge and understanding -not preaching- will lead to empathy. - Rudolf Steiner

A soul educated by reverence will convert its dark cravings and aversions into a feeling for the beautiful and a feeling for the good. A soul that has cleansed its obscure instincts and will-impulses through devotion will gradually build up from them what we call moral ideals. Reverence is something that we plant in the soul as a seed; and the seed will bear fruit. - Rudolf Steiner

In the spring, physical and spiritual, heavenly and earthly, work together - Rudolf Steiner

We will always find that those who truly know are the most humble and that nothing is more alien to them than any lust for power. - Rudolf Steiner

You must learn to perceive as your self that which lies outside you. Looking only within oneself leads to a hardening in oneself, to a higher egotism. - Rudolf Steiner

Colours are the soul of nature and the entire cosmos – and we become part of that soul when we live with the colours. - Rudolf Steiner

In the depths of winter the Earth is more earthly, more truly itself, than at any other time. - Rudolf Steiner

I know about what I am as human only when I don't live along stolidly, but when I allow myself to be lifted up to the heavens in summer, when I let myself sink down in winter into the Earth mysteries, into the secrets of the Earth. - Rudolf Steiner

The strength people need to proceed along the path of human development can come only from the spiritual worlds. - Rudolf Steiner

One can ascend to a higher development only by bringing rhythm and repetition into one's life. Rhythm holds sway in all nature. - Rudolf Steiner

Today's policies and political activity treat people like pawns. More than ever before, attempts will be made to use people like cogs in a wheel. People will be handled like puppets on a string, and everyone will think that this reflects the greatest progress imaginable. - Rudolf Steiner

At present, mankind exists amidst inharmonious, disordered conditions. But man knows how the world has emerged from chaos, and that out of his chaotic inner being harmony will ultimately arise. Like the regular paths of the planets around the sun, so will the inner saviour of mankind arise, — herald and creator of unity and harmony amid all disharmony. All humanity shall be reminded by the Easter festival of the resurrection of the spirit from the present obscurity of human nature. - Rudolf Steiner

At the beginning of autumn, at the Michael Festival, the picture of Michael with the Dragon will stand there to act as a powerful summons, a powerful spur to action, which must work on men in the midst of the events of our times. - Rudolf Steiner Michael Festival....a festival for the conquest of anxiety and fear; a festival of inner strength and initiative; a festival for the commemoration of selfless self-consciousness. - Rudolf Steiner

Anyone who fears a cataclysm in our social conditions if women are accepted not as generic entities but as individuals should be told that social conditions in which one half of humanity leads an existence unworthy of human beings are conditions that stand in great need of improvement. - Rudolf Steiner (over 100 years ago)

What the human being sees, what is poured into his environment, becomes a force in him. In accordance with it, he forms himself. - Rudolf Steiner

Only a person who has passed through the gate of humility can ascend to the heights of the spirit. - Rudolf Steiner

What can be healing for humanity can develop only if people find the way into the spiritual worlds, if people do not forget that there was not only one Christmas but that there must be an everlasting Christmas, an everlasting coming-to-birth of the divine- spiritual in the physical, earthly human being. - Rudolf Steiner

Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another the most varied opinions can be reconciled - thus one of the most important tasks for humankind today and in the future is that we should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of development is empty. ~ Rudolf Steiner

We must guard against disrespectful, disparaging, and criticizing thoughts. We must try to practice reverence and devotion in our thinking at all times. - Rudolf Steiner

Seek the truly practical life, but seek it in such a way that it does not blind you to the spirit working in it. Seek the spirit, but seek it not out of spiritual greed, but so that you may apply it in the genuinely practical life. - Rudolf Steiner

When human beings meet together seeking the spirit with unity of purpose then they will also find their way to each other. - 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. - Rudolf Steiner

The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others. - Rudolf Steiner

Each one of us has it in themselves to be a free spirit, just as every rose bud has in it a rose. - Rudolf Steiner

Wherever love and compassion are active in life, we can perceive the magic breath of the spirit blowing through the sense world. - Rudolf Steiner

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. - Rudolf Steiner

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. ~ Rudolf Steiner  

Deep in the ground of the human soul Of victory assured The Spirit-Sun is living All through the winter of the inner life, The faithful heart divines it. Rudolf Steiner

The outer world, with all its phenomena, is filled with divine splendour, but we must have experienced the divine within ourselves before we can discover it in our environment ~ Rudolf Steiner  

When what we introduce into the children's world of ideas and feelings is in line with the direction of the developmental forces of a given stage of life, we strengthen the entire developing person in a way that remains a source of strength throughout that person's life. ~ Rudolf Steiner

Mankind must above all seek universality and the courage to look at things from all sides ~ Rudolf Steiner

Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility—these three forces are the very nerve of education. ~Rudolf Steiner

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.  ~Rudolf Steiner

If there is something more powerful than destiny, this must be the human being who bears destiny unshaken. - Rudolf Steiner

Love starts when we push aside our ego and make room for someone else. ~ Rudolf Steiner  

At the turning-point of time, The Spirit-Light of the World Entered the stream of Earthly Evolution. Darkness of Night had held its sway; Day-radiant Light poured into the souls of men, Light that gave warmth to simple shepherds' hearts, Light that enlightened the wise heads of kings. O Light Divine! O Sun of Christ! Warm Thou our hearts, Enlighten Thou our heads, That good may become What from our hearts we would found And from our heads direct With single purpose. Rudolf Steiner, Christmas, 1923.  

The fact that we all bear a human countenance and encounter one another as external, physical human beings… this makes us equal on this footing. ~Rudolf Steiner

If one observes children, who by a right upbringing, have developed a natural reverence for the grownups and their surroundings, and if one follows them through their various stages of life, one can discover that their feelings of reverence and devotion in childhood are gradually being transformed during the years leading to old age. As adults such persons may have a healing effect upon their fellow man so that by their mere presence, or through the tone of their voice, or perhaps by a single glance they can spread inner peace to others.  - Rudolf Steiner  

Our highest endeavour must be to develop individuals who are able out of their own initiative to impart purpose & direction to their lives. - Rudolf Steiner

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. ~ Rudolf Steiner

May my soul bloom in love for all existence ~ Rudolf Steiner