Oswald Spengler Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler (2016). “Routledge Revivals: Man and Technics (1932): A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life”, p.56, Routledge
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“Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Jahre der Entscheidung (The Hour of Decision, 1933) pt. 1
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“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler (1991). “The Decline of the West”, p.394, Oxford University Press, USA
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“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 SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1950). “Perspectives of world history”
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“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.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler (1967). “Aphorisms”
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“The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals ...”
-- 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.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
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“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.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“History is direction—but Nature is extension—ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler (1991). “The Decline of the West”, p.396, Oxford University Press, USA
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“Fortunately, at the last hour, there were always a few soldiers to save Civilization.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
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“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.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler (1961). “Form and actuality”
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“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.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler (1967). “Aphorisms”
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“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.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler (1967). “Aphorisms”
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“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.”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : Oswald Spengler (1991). “The Decline of the West”, p.75, Oxford University Press, USA
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“Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“Every action alters the soul of the doer.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
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“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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“Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”
-- 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.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
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“We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.”
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“Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
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“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.”
-- Oswald Spengler -
“To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery(the media) 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”
-- Oswald SpenglerSource : "The Decline of the West (Volume II)". Book by Oswald Spengler, 1928.
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