Oswald Spengler Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.

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

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.

Oswald Spengler
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 experimental psychology.

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

Oswald Spengler
And so the development of the new mathematic consists of a long, secret, and finally victorious battle against the notion of magnitude.

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.

Oswald Spengler
Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end.

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
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.

Oswald Spengler
Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.

Oswald Spengler
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 think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.

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.

Oswald Spengler
Statistics belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to Destiny and Incident, and not to the world of laws and timeless causality.

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
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.

Oswald Spengler
Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are mathematics in stone.

Oswald Spengler
We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.

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.

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.

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

Oswald Spengler
What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.

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.

Oswald Spengler
Everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to the human soul at large.

Oswald Spengler
All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

Oswald Spengler