Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spenglerwas a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history. Spengler's civilization model postulates that any civilization is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth29 May 1880
CountryGermany
running men animal
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.
craft dull financier german-philosopher maintain practice sounder today
I maintain that today many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.
reading creative be-creative
One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.
expectations
We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.
germany may produce
We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.
practice psychology crafts
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.
giving wish logic
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
writing important matter
It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it.
reality history imagination
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.
spiritual soul doers
Every action alters the soul of the doer.
eye one-day gone
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.
race too-much
Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.
party ideas together
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.
path outbreaks socialist
Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.