Oswald Spengler Quotes

38 quotes in 741 categories

• Every action alters the soul of the doer.
• Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to…
• Optimism is cowardice.
• 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…
• One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and…
• 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…
• All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.
• 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…
• Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous…
• Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness
• When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country.
• One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.
• I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of…
• If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.
• 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,…

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