Rudolf Steiner: Theosophy

Essential Quotes

“Man has three sides to his nature.… By body is here meant that by which the things in the environment of a man reveal themselves to him.… By the word soul is signified that by which he links the things to his own being.… By spirit is meant that which becomes manifest in him when, as Goethe expressed it, he looks at things as ‘a so-to-speak divine being.’”

“The soul is placed between the present and eternity, in that it holds the middle place between body and spirit. But it is also the intermediary between the present and eternity. It preserves the present for the remembrance. It thereby rescues it from impermanence, and brings it nearer to the eternity of the spiritual.”

“The spirit of man therefore carries each moment of its life a twofold possession within itself, firstly, the eternal laws of the good and the true; secondly, the remembrance of the experiences of the past.… To understand a human spirit we must therefore know two different things about him, first, how much of the eternal has revealed itself to him; second, how much treasure from the past is stored up within him.”

“The human form can never be explained by what lies between birth and death.… Physical materials and forces build up the body during life; the forces of propagation enable another body, inheriting its form, to proceed from it; that is to say, one which is able to be the bearer of the same life-body. Each life-body is a repetition of its forefathers.”

“In each life the human spirit appears as a repetition of itself with the fruits of its former experiences in previous lives. This life is consequently the repetition of another, and brings with it what the spirit-self has, by work, acquired for itself in the previous life. When the spirit-self absorbs something that can develop into fruit, it penetrates itself with the life-spirit.”

“A physical body, receiving its form through the laws of heredity, comes upon the scene. This body becomes the bearer of a spirit which repeats a previous life in a new form. Between the two stands the soul, which … receives the impressions of the outer world and carries them to the spirit, in order that the spirit may extract from them the fruits that are for eternity.”

“Life in the present is not independent of the previous lives. For the incarnating spirit brings its destiny with it from its previous incarnations, and this destiny decides the kind of life.… The life of the soul is therefore the result of the self-created destiny of the human spirit.… One calls this fate created by the man himself his karma. The spirit is under the law of re-embodiment or reincarnation.”