Rudolf Steiner Quotes

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

A thought is an idea in transit.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.

If he had a mind, there was something on it.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered.

In Aristotle the mind, regarded as the principle of life, divides into nutrition, sensation, and faculty of thought, corresponding to the inner most important stages in the succession of vital phenomena.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

Every thought is an afterthought.

To ask at what time a man has first any ideas is to ask when he begins to perceive; having ideas and perception being the same thing.