Oswald Spengler quotes - page 2

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. (Oswald Spengler)
Fortunately, at the last hour, there were always a few soldiers to save Civilization. View quote
Oswald Spengler
Every action alters the soul of the doer. View quote
Oswald Spengler
Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Oswald Spengler
Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible. View quote
Oswald Spengler
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. View quote
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. View quote
Oswald Spengler
We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar. View quote
Oswald Spengler
We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Oswald Spengler
When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Oswald Spengler
The meaning of socialism is that life is dominated not by the contrast of rich and poor but by rank as determined by achievement and ability. View quote
Oswald Spengler
The interlaced borders of the "Late-Roman" mosaic pavements and sarcophagus-edges, and even geometrical plane-patterns are introduced, and finally, throughout the Persian-Anatolian world, mobility and bizarrerie culminate in the Arabesque. This is the genuine Magian motive-anti-plastic to the last degree, hostile to the pictorial and to the bodily alike. Itself bodiless, it disembodies the object over which its endless richness of web is drawn. View quote
Oswald Spengler
The principle of inorganic equality was for them crucial. Men of the stamp of Jahn and Arndt had no notion that it was Equality that had first sounded the cry of "Vive la nation" in the September massacres of 1792. (Oswald Spengler)