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You can use Google to search for any topic at the Rudolf Steiner Archive to see what Steiner says:
This web page is a VERY LIMITED list of topics exploring what Steiner says about different subjects. Do not let these isolated quotes form the basis for your overall opinion of Rudolf Steiner! For a more comprehensive understanding of what Steiner says, search the Rudolf Steiner Archives for topics that interest you. Visit the OpenWaldorf Reading Room where you can find links to many full-text books by Rudolf Steiner online.
IMPORTANT: These quotes are taken out of context! You owe it to Steiner to click the Google searches yourself, and read the quotes in their original full context!
What did Steiner Say about...
Google Searches
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Steiner Says... (Search terms highlighted here and in full context at Google for your convenience.) An ![]() |
(about 19 pages)
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"When people say that their ancestors' belief in gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders and the like was all nonsense, one would like to make a rather grotesque reply, and say: 'Well, go and ask the bees. They could inform you: the sylphs are no superstition to us; we know well enough what we owe to the sylphs.'"
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(about 684 pages)
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"In the consciousness of the clairvoyant one finds an image of the future stages of mankind. Moreover, the three subsequent conditions of consciousness are now already present in all men in germinal states; and clairvoyant research has means for indicating what will emerge from these germinal states." "In olden times, man had clairvoyant revelations and did not understand them. Today man must first understand, must exert to the utmost his intellectual power, must exert to the utmost his reason. If he so exerts it through that which lies before him in Spiritual Science, then mankind will again develop the power of receiving the Spiritual clairvoyantly." "We have attempted in the last few days to gain an understanding of the Christ-impulse on the basis of a clairvoyant study of the Akashic record, and to establish that impulse as an actual fact in the evolution of mankind. Moreover we referred only to those parts of the Gospels which appear to confirm the facts previously ascertained and verified by clairvoyant research."
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(about 271 pages)
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"We intend to follow up this direction and show how the laws of reincarnation and karma, seen from this point of view, are a natural-scientific necessity." "It is said that Christianity knows nothing of this teaching of reincarnation. But actually in the John Gospel there is a clear indication that when he spoke intimately with his disciples, Jesus taught reincarnation." "And when we reflect about these things, an idea that is beautiful and true comes to us of what Spiritual Science will be able to do for the evolution of humanity, and of the enrichment which human life in all its forms will receive through knowledge of the laws on Reincarnation and Karma." "After initial acquaintance with some of the basic teachings of anthroposophy such as reincarnation and karma the teaching that the human soul has in the past been incarnated repeatedly in a physical body and will continue to return in future incarnations, and the teaching of karma, of compensatory justice most people will ask how one can comprehend these teachings and how one can acquire an understanding of these on one's own. ... The golden rule is this, Live your life as if reincarnation and karma were truths and they will become truths for you." "When we, in Anthroposophy, teach reincarnation to-day, we are fully conscious, in the light of the Whitsun festival, that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be made known exoterically to-day to a humanity which has become more mature, but which could not be made known to the immature souls of the first Christian centuries."
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(about 554 pages)
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"Our logic, knowledge of nature, technology and so forth, grow from a foundation which was laid in Atlantis. If, for instance, an engineer could transform his combining faculty backward, something would result which was in the power of the Atlantean. ...The esthetic sense of the Greeks is built up on the basis of directly acting forces which among the Atlanteans were manifested in a magnificent breeding of plant and animal forms." "The vehicles of the Atlanteans, which floated a short distance above the ground travelled at a height lower than that of the mountain ranges of the Atlantean period, and they had steering mechanisms by the aid of which they could rise above these mountain ranges."
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(about 194 pages)
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"It is easy to arrive at a mistaken distinction between what we have brought from earlier incarnations and what we have inherited from our parents and forbears. When we reincarnate we do not come haphazard to such and such parents or to such and such a country. There is operating here a motive allied to our innermost being."
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(about 57 pages)
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"The Initiates -- and so too the Three Magi -- were endowed with Manas. They bring gold, frankincense and myrrh as their offerings. And why are their skins of three colours: white, yellow and black? One is European -- his skin is white; one is Indian -- his skin is yellow; one is African -his skin is black. This indicates the connection with the so-called Root Races. The remaining survivors of the Lemurian race are black; those of the Atlantean race are yellow; and the representatives of the Fifth Root Race, the Post-Atlantean or Aryan race, are white."
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(about 18 pages)
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"One spiral of the sign of Cancer indicates the end of the Atlantean culture; the other, the beginning of the Aryan culture. Our ancestors thus perceived in the heavens the outward sign for the rise of the new Aryan culture."
"...there are seven great epochs of Aryan civilisation in which the laws of evolution slowly come to expression." "IN THIS CHAPTER we shall learn about the transition of the fourth, the Atlantean root race, into the fifth, the Aryan, to which contemporary civilized mankind belongs."
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(about 4 pages)
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"Whenever an important event occurs in the world, whenever one stage of evolution is superseded by another thereby bringing something new into the world, two such spiral movements intertwine. One spiral of the sign of Cancer indicates the end of the Atlantean culture; the other, the beginning of the Aryan culture. Our ancestors thus perceived in the heavens the outward sign for the rise of the new Aryan culture."
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(about 2 pages)
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"Everything which gives the Ethiopian race its special characteristics comes from the fact that the Mercury forces seethe and surge in the glandular system of this people. What modifies the universal human form into the special form of the Ethiopian race with black skin and wooly hair and so on, is the result of their activity. This modification of the common human form comes therefor from these forces."
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(about 2 pages)
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"...now we can translate the legend with which I ended my lecture yesterday from the negro version into that of modem civilization. Yesterday I had to narrate this legend from what may be called the negro point of view..." "If we now more closely characterise the spot which in our recent statements we placed in Africa, by saying, that through the co-operation of the normal Spirits of Form with the abnormal ones centred in Mercury, the negro race came into existence, we are then, from an occult standpoint, quite correct in describing what appears in the black race, as the `Mercury race'."
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(about 738 pages) |
"Since Anthroposophy provides such good material for interest, and is such a good medium for experiences, people are helpless and without power of resistance when they meet it."
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(about 246 pages)
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"Our studies of the last few days will have made it clear to you that it is altogether impossible to look upon the configuration of the spatial Universe and its movements in the way that is adopted by modern science."
"At first one is amazed at such a comment as the following, which comes from scientists upon whom these truths dawn: 'The old mythologies have more physiology in them than modern science has.' I can understand the shock and surprise; but the remark has its deep core of truth." "A true understanding of modern science, not the dilettante understanding to be found even in University Professors, but understanding that is free from abstract theorising and materialistic conjectures, standing firmly upon the basis of facts and not going beyond them, can find from science itself the proofs of the spiritual truths of Rosicrucianism." "Now what the Moon forces thus do for man essentially depends upon the fact that the Moon is not the mere physical body of which modern science tells its tales, but is permeated everywhere by spirituality. The Moon itself in fact contains a multitude of spiritual beings." "A thoroughly unprejudiced investigation of that which is essential in the processes of Nature convinces us of the mistake we make when we give ourselves up to the great illusion of modern science: Effects are the result of their causes. It is not so." "Spiritual science seeks to enlarge our horizon in regard to the true nature of man and to make us see a little more than what we are able to see through the generally accepted form of modern science. It wishes to draw our attention to epochs of human evolution which lie far back in time, for instance, to the Atlantean epoch, and to show us what man was like upon Atlantis; then it also seeks to point out to us the true nature of the evolutionary processes in which the human being is really involved."
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