104 Quotes by Oswald Spengler

Leben ist Tun und Leiden. Je wissender ein Mensch, desto tiefer sein seelisches Leid.

One does not reflect on a point of honor – that is already dishonor. To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy – all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous.

Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms – social, spiritual and political – which we see so clearly?

History is direction – but Nature is extension – ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.

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.

At all times and in all places, the men and women of every culture deserve each other.

It doesn’t really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it.

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.

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.