“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.”

— Oswald Spengler

Source: The Decline of the West, Vol 2: Perspectives of World History

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears." by Oswald Spengler?

Oswald Spengler 23

German historian and philosopher 1880–1936

Related quotes

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”

Clarice Lispector book The Passion According to G.H.

Source: The Passion According to G.H.

“What we now need is a multitude of participants to take part in the great discussion and to join in the search for the larger truth and the more fruitful patterns of belief which we confidently believe is waiting to be elicited.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

The New Divinity (1964)

“Many people think they cannot have knowledge or understanding of God without reading books. But hearing is better than reading, and seeing is better than hearing. Hearing about Benares is different from reading about it; but seeing Benares is different from either hearing or reading.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 863

“The sight of such a monument is like continual and stationary music, which one hears for one's good as one approaches it.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Corinne

La vue d'un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée, qui vous attend pour vous faire du bien quand vous vous en approchez.
Bk. 4, ch. 3
The idea that "architecture is frozen music" — an aphorism of disputed origin sometimes misattributed to de Staël — is found in a number of German writers of the period.
Corinne (1807)

“I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.