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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the role of women in the continuity of life and culture, contrasting it with the male-dominated narrative of history.
Oswald Spengler's quote emphasizes the enduring and foundational role of femininity in the process of life and reproduction, suggesting that while men may shape historical events and narratives, women are the silent, steadfast force that ensures the survival and continuity of species and cultures. This perspective invites reflection on the significance of femininity as a vital and often overlooked component of civilization's evolution, highlighting that true historical essence may lie in the unchanging, nurturing aspects of existence rather than in the chaotic achievements typically associated with masculinity.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a women's history month speech to emphasize the importance of women's contributions to society.
More from Oswald Spengler
All quotes →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.
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.
Similar quotes
The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.
what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
Only the dead stay seventeen forever.
Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.
Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.
It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.