Rudolf Steiner Quotes

A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

Painting, for me, is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language.

I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

Art is elemental. Reason alone as it's expressed in the sciences can't be man's complete answer to reality, and it can't express everything that man can, wants to, and has to express. I think God built this into man. Art along with science is the highest gift God has given him.

I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves.

As a kid, there was a painting of 'Appeal to the Great Spirit' that I would see when I would get oatmeal bowls out of the cupboard. This painting, it was so real to me that it frightened me.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

I frequently dream of being on these horses' backs and running across a field. And the horse and I are one.

Faith is spiritualized imagination.

I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

Any man who does not have his inner world to translate is not an artist.

I have always had a mystical attitude toward inspiration. That's my nature.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.

I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

I love monsters the way people worship holy images. To me, they really connect in a very fundamental way to my identity.