Rudolf Steiner

The subject of the lesson itself should not become more important that the underlying basis. Drawing thus provides first the written forms of letters and then their printed forms. Based on drawing, we build up to reading.

We have to realize that when we talk in front of other people about things only we can understand, those people will not be able to avoid getting wrong impressions.

In order for the students' development and the outer development of civilization to coincide, we need a faculty whose interest is not limited to specialized educational practices. Rather, this faculty must be fully involved in the broader aspects of life.

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.

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.

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

When children draw or do rudimentary painting, the whole human being develops an interest in what is being done. This is why we should allow writing to develop from drawing.

Anyone who believes that it is possible to educate the will without cultivating the insight that enlivens it is succumbing to illusion. Clear-sightedness on this point is a task for present-day pedagogy, but it can come only from a life-filled understanding of the whole human being.

You must always be open to new experiences; by this means, your physical and etheric bodies will be brought into a condition which may be compared with the contented mood of a brooding hen.

Learning certain things purely through memory is related to the developmental forces that are present between the sixth or seventh year and the fourteenth year of life. This quality of human nature is what mathematical instruction should be based on.

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.

You can go from object to object, from plant to plant, from animal to animal and regard them as symbols for the spiritual. In this way, you make your imaginative capacities fluid and release them from the sharp contours of sense perception.

Our thoughts do not actually exist; they are only pictures. A great error was made at the end of the last human developmental period when existence was equated with thinking. 'Cogito ergo sum' is the greatest error ever placed at the head of the modern world view.

What the spiritual investigator has to do to acquire the faculty of looking into the spiritual world consists exclusively of processes of spirit and soul; they have nothing to do with changes in the body, nor with visions arising from an abnormal bodily life.

Knowledge has value only insofar as it contributes to the all-round development of the whole nature of man.

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.

Our task is to find teaching methods that continually engage the whole human being. We would not succeed in this endeavor if we failed to concentrate on developing the human sense of art.

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

By immersing ourselves with our consciousness in a supersensible world, we now learn a new kind of thinking, a new life of mental pictures, one that is not dependent on the nervous system in the way ordinary thinking is. We know that previously we have had to make use of our nervous system, but now we no longer need our brain.

The Oriental thinks everything in the sense-perceptible world is 'maya'; everything perceived by our senses and all thinking connected with sense perceptions is 'maya,' the great illusion. The only reality is the reality of the soul. What a human being achieves in his or her soul is reality.