Rudolf Steiner Quotes

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

Self-control is solely a matter of thought-control!

If you relax too much, the subconscious plays the role; the conscious does something else, rather than the other way around, which is the way it's supposed to be.

The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.

Guard your roving thoughts with a jealous care, for speech is but the dialer of thoughts, and every fool can plainly read in your words what is the hour of your thoughts.

The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

It is safe to make a choice of your thoughts, scarcely ever safe to express them all.

Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. It's important not to blame yourself.

It is pretty clear that they are ineffective in stopping the course of thought at present, but they have not always been so in the past and we cannot be sure that they will not be so in the future.

I thought a lot and I controlled my thoughts in my work - and I controlled my work through my thoughts.

Are we controlled by our thoughts, or are we controlling our thoughts?

I think everyone has a door in their brain that says, 'Do not exit here.' If you go past it, you'll find all the dumb thoughts in there, all the stupid things that shouldn't be said. I've probably gone there more than anyone should in a given lifetime.

Once I realized that right thinking is vital to victorious living, I got more serious about thinking about what I was thinking about, and choosing my thoughts carefully.

Racing thoughts was the biggest hurdle to consistent meditation for me. I could sit down, but then I was left with this interior world of thoughts.

To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.

If you can't control what you think, you will not be able to control what you do.

What we think is, in the adult person, very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to feel. Moreover, what we think is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to feel. In short, the condition of our mind is very much a matter of the direction in which our will is set.

You either control your mind or it controls you.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

In any given moment we are either practicing mindfulness, or defacto, we are practicing mindlessness.

We are the product of our thinking, so it is important that we choose carefully where to focus our mental energy.

Our minds are forced to become fixed upon different things by an attraction in them which we cannot resist. To control the mind, to place it just where we want it, requires special training. It cannot be done in any other way. In the study of religion the control of the mind is absolutely necessary. We have to turn the mind back upon itself in this study.

The breath of the mind is attention.

Some feel that you lose your independence if you don't let your mind just wander where it wants to, if you try to control it. But that is not the case. If your mind is proceeding in the correct way, one already has the correct opinion. But if your mind is proceeding in an incorrect way, then it's necessary, definitely, to exercise control.