Quotes from Oswald Spengler

The question of how to either play an active role in a Western tragedy entering its final act, or to lamentably perish as a passive victim of the universal mechanisation that is to be its general theme, is at the heart of the present volume by Oswald Spengler entitled Man and Technics, originally published in 1931.

Hay que ser héroe o santo. En el término medio no está la sabiduría, sino la vulgaridad

Der Farbige durchschaut den Weißen, wenn er von "Menschheit" und ewigem Frieden redet. Er wittert die Unfähigkeit und den fehlenden Willen, sich zu verteidigen.

All the great successes of statesmanlike art and clever popular instincts were the result of cool contemplation, long silence and waiting, hard self-control and, above all, a fundamental renunciation of intoxication and and spectacles.

A beast of prey tamed and in captivity — every zoological garden can furnish examples — is mutilated, world-sick, inwardly dead.

The fight against Nature is hopeless and yet — it will be fought out to the bitter end.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the value of truth and knowledge… Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.

Heute leben wir so widerstandslos unter der Wirkung dieser geistigen Artillerie, dass kaum jemand den inneren Abstand gewinnt, um sich das Ungeheuerliche dieses Schauspiels klarzumachen. Der Wille zur Macht in rein demokratischer Verkleidung hat sein Meisterstück damit vollendet, dass dem Freiheitsgefühl der Objekte mit der vollkommensten Knechtung, die es je gegeben hat, sogar noch geschmeichelt wird.

To Goethe we owe the profound saying: 'The mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true'. Here we feel how nearly the secret of number is related to the secret of artistic creation. Mathematics, then, are an art. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

Men of a future Culture, with other souls and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that 'in those days' Nature herself was tottering.