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
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the individual's choice between living for themselves or sacrificing their life for a greater cause in history.
Oswald Spengler's quote reflects on the significance of individual lives in the context of historical events. He suggests that each person must confront the dilemma of whether to pursue personal interests or to contribute to a larger narrative, indicating that history is indifferent to individual logic and decisions. In essence, it invites reflection on the value of personal sacrifice versus self-preservation in the grand scheme of human history.
In practice
During a speech on personal values, this quote could be used to emphasize the importance of living for a cause.
In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.
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.
Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.
If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.
It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.
Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.
There are three forces, the only three forces capable of conquering and enslaving forever the conscience of these weak rebels in the interests of their own happiness. They are: the miracle, the mystery and authority.
There is no such thing as an ordinary life.
Compassion and love is the source of external and internal peace and is also the root of racial survival.
From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.
When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything.
Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It's the only thing "real" men do that doesn't seem to threaten their masculinity. To women, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw.
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