It should not be expected that what is spiritual can be brought before the eyes, before the senses. It must be experienced inwardly and spiritually.
Rudolf SteinerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Understanding nature requires self-awareness and inner knowledge.
Rudolf Steiner emphasizes that to truly comprehend and appreciate the natural world, we must first explore and understand the nature that exists within ourselves. This inner familiarity acts as our guiding principle, shaping our inquiries and allowing us to connect more deeply with the external environment.
Themes
NatureSelf-AwarenessInner KnowledgeGuideEnquiry
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might say, 'As Rudolf Steiner reminds us, we can find Nature outside us only if we have first learned to know her within us.'
More from Rudolf Steiner
All quotes →In ancient, prehistoric times, the temples of the spirit were outwardly visible, but today, when our life has become so unspiritual, they no longer exist where we can see them with our physical eyes. Yet spiritually they are still present everywhere, and whoever seeks can find them.
Rudolf SteinerRead
Only a person who has passed through the gate of humility can ascend to the heights of the spirit.
Rudolf SteinerRead
Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling, and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfill the same purpose.
Rudolf SteinerRead
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 SteinerRead
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.
Rudolf SteinerRead
Similar quotes
Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
Charles DarwinRead
The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.
Henry David ThoreauRead
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Tom RobbinsRead
In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.
Francis BaconRead
When you meet chimps you meet individual personalities. When a baby chimp looks at you it's just like a human baby. We have a responsibility to them.
Jane GoodallRead
Eastward the dawn rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into guess; it was no more than a glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of the memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains.
J. R. R. TolkienRead