Best 52 quotes of Oswald Spengler on MyQuotes

Oswald Spengler

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    Oswald Spengler

    And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad.

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    Oswald Spengler

    A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.

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    Oswald Spengler

    At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought . Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Every action alters the soul of the doer.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Fortunately, at the last hour, there were always a few soldiers to save Civilization.

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    Oswald Spengler

    History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

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    Oswald Spengler

    If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.

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    Oswald Spengler

    If you are clever enough to figure out what men want, you are either too wise to marry them or too intimidating for them to marry you.

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    Oswald Spengler

    I maintain that to-day many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practise the dull craft of experimental psychology.

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    Oswald Spengler

    In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

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    Oswald Spengler

    It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it.

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    Oswald Spengler

    It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself.

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    Oswald Spengler

    One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.

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    Oswald Spengler

    One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

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    Oswald Spengler

    One does not reflect on a point of honor - that is already dishonor. To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy - all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Optimism is cowardice.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Pacifism means letting the non-pacifists have control ... Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage war again, the colored will act differently and become rulers of the world.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact, and if the White race decides to wage it no longer, the dark ones will, and will become the masters of the world.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness

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    Oswald Spengler

    The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort-“happiness.” He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering.

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    Oswald Spengler

    The individual's life is of importance to none besides himself: the point is whether he wishes to escape from history or give his life for it. History recks nothing of human logic

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    Oswald Spengler

    The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

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    Oswald Spengler

    The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.

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    Oswald Spengler

    There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

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    Oswald Spengler

    This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.

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    Oswald Spengler

    To-day a democrat of the old school would demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but mean-time the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to secure their position vis-a-vis the masses.

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    Oswald Spengler

    To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

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    Oswald Spengler

    We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

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    Oswald Spengler

    We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.

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    Oswald Spengler

    We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

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    Oswald Spengler

    When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country.

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    Oswald Spengler

    When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning point has come.

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    Oswald Spengler

    When three liberals get together they form a new party; that is their idea of individualism. They never join a bowling club without introducing as part of the 'agenda' an 'amendment of the statutes.

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    Oswald Spengler

    You are caught in the current of unceasing change. Your life is a ripple in it. Every moment of your conscious life links the infinite past with the infinite future. Take part in both and you will not find the present empty.

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    Oswald Spengler

    I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout it’s whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feelings, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves - but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in the deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.

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    Oswald Spengler

    It is a bizarre, but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the physics of the Greeks — being statics and not dynamics — neither knew the use nor felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand work in thousandths of a second.

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    Oswald Spengler

    It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless. The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual -- from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual -- whether this be animal or plant or man -- is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the "have-been" works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hybris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements"?

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    Oswald Spengler

    Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine. A doctrine that does not attack and affect the life of the period in its inmost depths is no doctrine and had better not be taught.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Once upon a time, Freedom and Necessity were identical; but now what is understood by freedom is in fact indiscipline.

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    Oswald Spengler

    Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances”, this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, … this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols - like and consistent amongst themselves - belongs most definitely not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures. Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There - it must be.

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    Oswald Spengler

    The man makes History, the woman is History.