Inspirational quotes and words

This page is for collecting inspirational quotes and short extracts, most as they come and go from the home page. Please let us know if you have more to share!

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.
A Maori Proverb

Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.
Isa Upanishad

Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is?
The children themselves are this book.
We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us
and consisting of the children themselves.
Rudolf Steiner

He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy,
that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated,
became simple and clear when he forgave and loved.
Leo Tolstoy

A Saviour, A Redeemer came,
A Son of Man, in love and might,
Who did an ever-quickening flame
Within our souls as fire ignite.
We only now saw heaven open
As our ancient fatherland,
Now were faith and hope awoken,
We felt ourselves at God’s right hand.
from Spiritual Songs, by Novalis

May you find the time to celebrate the quiet wonders
which often do not have any admirers in this noisy world.
Irish blessing

The wind of God’s Grace is always blowing, but you must raise your sail.
Swami Vivekananda

“One kind word can warm three winter months.”
Japanese proverb

‘Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes’
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization.
Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life.
If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development.
A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Life and death are one thread. The same line viewed from different sides. 
Lao Tsu

‘To know all means to renounce all. To love all means to have understanding of everything.’
White Eagle

“Unless you believe in divine revelations, what I’m saying will sound like nonsense,
but I believe that when God created the world, he created everything, so music is something that already exists.
You just have to be very still and hear it. Plato believed that was the case.
I’m not being over-pious if I say to God, ‘Guide me, help me.’ It’s a kind of prayer, so therefore writing music is a kind of prayer.”
John Taverner

Our mother earth has hardened
through pain.
Our mission is to
spiritualise her again,
by reworking her through
the power of our hands
into a spirit-filled work of art.
Rudolf Steiner, over 100 years ago

“The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.” 
Elisabeth Kubler Ross

“When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.”
Albert Einstein

Encourage, lift and strengthen one another. For the positive energy spread to one will be felt by us all.
Deborah Day

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
Saint Francis of Assisi

‘Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.’
Albert Schweizer

‘Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous’
Albert Einstein

‘Live with your century, but do not be its creature.’
Friedrich Schiller

‘Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care,
but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.’
William Blake
From ‘Songs of experience’

‘You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the think you think  you cannot do.’
Eleanor Roosevelt

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
e.e. cummings

‘As far as the inner voice is concerned, it is different for every single person, and there are no outward securities to guarantee it, such as reason, science, the church, or any teachings. But anyone whose eyes have been opened has no more need of these securities, than a man with a compass need laboriously to figure out where North or South will be from any future position.’
Mihajlo Mihajlov – ‘The mystical experiences of loss of freedom’

‘The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd.
The person who walks alone is likely to find him/herself in places no-one has ever seen before.’
Albert Einstein
My dear, In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
Truly yours, Albert Camus
“Everyone can attempt as time permits to send thoughts of love and friendship to their loved ones. We usually think such a thing insignificant. If you recognize that a thought has a power in the same way as an electrical wave, which goes from one apparatus to a receiver, then you will also understand better the mutual help principle. Then slowly a common consciousness becomes available, it becomes practical.”
~ Rudolf Steiner

‘Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.’
Albert Schweizer

Ecce Homo
Yes! I know from whence I came!
Ever hungry like the flame,
Glowing, I consume myself.

Light shines forth from all I seize.
Coal remains of all I leave.
Flame, I am indeed!
– Friedrich Nietzsche

‘Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.’
Albert Einstein

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.
by Juan Ramon Jimenez

“…When people have light in themselves, it will shine out from them.
Then we get to know each other as we walk together in the darkness,
without needing to pass our hands over each other’s faces,
or to intrude into each other’s hearts.”
Albert Schweitzer

Until this ‘die and be born again’ is yours, you are but a sorry tenant in a gloomy world.
Goethe

”The greatness of the spiritual scientific movement is that it brings to us a new conviction of spiritual forces which stream from one human being to another, the higher mutual help principle. You can imagine for yourself how far we are away from such a spiritual mutual help principle.
Everyone can attempt as time permits to send thoughts of love and friendship to their loved ones. We usually think such a thing insignificant. If you recognize that a thought has a power in the same way as an electrical wave, which goes from one apparatus to a receiver, then you will also understand better the mutual help principle. Then slowly a common consciousness becomes available, it becomes practical.”
~ Rudolf Steiner

You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own… His religious feeling takes the form of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
Albert Einstein

“Life is not waiting for the storms to pass; it is to learn to dance in the rain.”
Seneca


“Raise your children in beauty and they’ll find their way in life.”
A nature spirit – from the book, Nature Spirits and What they Say

“If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear.
If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into aliveness,
alertness, and creativity.”
Eckhart Tolle
The whole world is a series of miracles… but we are so used to them
we call them ordinary things.
Hans Christian Andersen
Human Life is vindicated only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart’s blood of divine spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities permeating them with  moral impulses.
Rudolf Steiner
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
Albert Einstein
“I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.”
DH Lawrence

“Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind.
To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.”
Buddha

…When people have light in themselves, it will shine out from them.
Then we get to know each other as we walk together in the darkness,
without needing to pass our hands over each other’s faces,
or to intrude into each other’s hearts.
Albert Schweitzer

Yes! I know from whence I came!
Ever hungry like the flame,
Glowing I consume myself.

Light shines forth from all I seize.
Coal remains of all I leave.
Flame, I am indeed!
Ecce Homo – Friedrich Nietzsche

Man has his being in truth — if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying, but of acting against one’s conviction.
Novalis

And the reason why all men honor love, is because it looks up and not down; aspires and not despairs.
Emerson

I know now that the world is not filled with strangers.
It is full of other people – waiting only to be spoken to.
Beth Day

“The meaning of human life is the establishment
of the kingdom of God on earth. And that means
the replacement of the egoistical, hating, dictatorial
and irrational things with a life of
brotherhood, freedom and reason.“
Leo Tolstoy

“We do not become free by refusing to
acknowledge something above us, but by
respecting something above us.”
Goethe

I know now that the world is not filled with strangers.
It is full of other people – waiting only to be spoken to.
Beth Day

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.
by Juan Ramon Jimenez