Quotes from Oswald Spengler

Nature is to be handeled scientifically, History poetically. Everything else is an impure solution.

Every action alters the soul of the doer.

Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine. A doctrine that does not attack and affect the life of the period in its inmost depths is no doctrine and had better not be taught.

Who amongst them realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the space perspective of Western oil painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities?

Jeder Grieche hat einen Zug von Don Quijotte, jeder Römer einen von Sancho Pansa - was sie sonst noch waren, tritt dahinter zurück.

Hölle. Wer nicht glauben kann und sich doch danach sehnt, wer weiß, wie erbärmlich der Aufkläricht ist und ihn doch nicht loswird, der weiß auch, was Hölle ist. Wissend in den Unglauben verbannt zu sein.

Von Goethe stammt auch das tiefe Wort, daß der Mathematiker nur insofern vollkommen sei, als er das Schöne des Wahren in sich empfinde.

Civilization is the ultimate destiny of the Culture… Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion… petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood.

El ser se extingue cuando se extingue la voluntad de lucha

Más vale una vida breve, llena de hazañas y de nobleza, que una vida larga sin contenido

It is the same creative will-to-life that was brilliantly and theatrically formulated by Nietzsche in 'Zarathustra'; that led the Hegelian Marx to an economic and the Malthusian Darwin to a biological hypothesis which, together, have subtly transformed the world-outlook of the Western megalopolis.

Hemos nacido en este tiempo y debemos recorrer el camino hasta el final. No hay otro. Es nuestro deber permanecer sin esperanza de salvación en el puesto ya perdido. Permanecer como aquel soldado romano cuyo esqueleto se ha encontrado delante de una puerta en Pompeya que murió porque al estallar la erupción del Vesubio nadie se acordó de licenciarlo. Eso es grandeza. Eso es tener raza. Ese honroso final es lo único que no se le puede quitar al hombre

Can criticism the, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope, we call the secret a problem.

The will-to-power is intolerant — all that is Faustian wills to reign alone. The Apollinian feeling, on the contrary, with its world of coexistent individual things, is tolerant as a matter of course.

A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which was born at his birth.

World history is [the] conflict of nature in man and apart from man, akin to the other great spectacles of nature... the earthquake, the thunderstorm, the storm. The beauty of destruction, the greatness of the will to win.

When it comes to essential things, no one is tolerant.

A true International is only possible through the victory of the idea of one race over all others, and not through the dissolution of all opinions into a colourless mass.

Diodor relateaza istoria unui faraon detronat care a locuit la Roma, intr-un apartament sordid de la un etaj situat undeva foarte sus, intr-o cladire oarecare.

Societies decline when the upper classes emulate the lower classes.

Un tempo non era permesso a nessuno di pensare liberamente. Ora sarebbe permesso, ma nessuno ne è più capace. Ora la gente vuole pensare ciò che si suppone debba pensare. E questo lo considera libertà.

The birth of the Ego, and of the world-anxiety with which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself...Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety.

Cowardice causes blindness.

Everyone has a soul. But the great man—the truly significant soul—is rare.