Oswald Spengler Quotes

For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

In any art movement, the art has to move into a new phase - a filmmaker has a desire to make a film that is not like a previous film.

The old, sad art colors are gone. Now I paint bright colors. I paint paintings which are happy, where children are laughing and playing with animals. I paint paradise on Earth. I still paint sadness sometimes, but there is sadness in the world, too.

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.

If I were to try and find a unifying emotion that kept me calm and focused while I was dancing or writing or solving a math problem, I think the one unifying thing about all those that keeps my interest is creativity.

To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They're all creative expressions.

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.

It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

Die Kunst ist ewig, ihre Formen wandeln sich. (The art is eternal, their shapes are changing.)

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.

Many artists have said that when life itself becomes fully conscious, art as we know it will vanish.

I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.

New arts destroy the old.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.

And despite the fact that the basis of this mathematical way of thinking in art is in reason, its dynamic content is able to launch us on astral flights which soar into unknown and still uncharted regions of the imagination.

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

Why should art continue to follow nature when every other field has left nature behind?

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.

Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Modern art is childish - not childlike, remember, childish; not innocent but stupid, insane, pathological. We have to get rid of this trend. We have to create a new kind of art, a new kind of creativity. We have to bring to the world again what Gurdjieff calls objective art.