Top 63 Johan Huizinga Quotes
#1. William James once said: "Progress is a terrible thing." It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?
Johan Huizinga
#2. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
Johan Huizinga
#3. Nelson's famous signal before the Battle of Trafalgar was not: "England expects that every man will be a hero." It said: "Englandexpects that every man will do his duty." In 1805 that was enough. It should still be.
Johan Huizinga
#4. It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.
Johan Huizinga
#5. If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.
Johan Huizinga
#6. Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
Johan Huizinga
#7. The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses.
Johan Huizinga
#8. We can't put up a protectionist dam on our own against the neo-liberal world market either. However, we can try, together with our European partners, to maintain the social character of Europe as much as possible.
Johan Huizinga
#9. From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.
Johan Huizinga
#10. Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
Johan Huizinga
#11. The art of watching has become mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree.
Johan Huizinga
#12. A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
Johan Huizinga
#13. The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.
Johan Huizinga
#14. What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
Johan Huizinga
#15. The outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabbalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings.
Johan Huizinga
#16. A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
Johan Huizinga
#17. No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.
Johan Huizinga
#18. There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense.
Johan Huizinga
#19. If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.
Johan Huizinga
#20. In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.
Johan Huizinga
#21. Without claiming superiority of intellectual over visual understanding, one is nevertheless bound to admit that the cinema allowsa number of aesthetic-intellectual means of perception to remain unexercised which cannot but lead to a weakening of judgment.
Johan Huizinga
#22. An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
Johan Huizinga
#23. Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
Johan Huizinga
#24. You only live a short time ... and you are dead a long time.
Johan Huizinga
#25. History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
Johan Huizinga
#26. Under weak government, in a wide, thinly populated country, in the struggle against the raw natural environment and with the freeplay of economic forces, unified social groups become the transmitters of culture.
Johan Huizinga
#27. These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.
Johan Huizinga
#28. We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, intothis susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.
Johan Huizinga
#29. The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
Johan Huizinga
#30. The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
Johan Huizinga
#31. We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.
Johan Huizinga
#32. Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.
Johan Huizinga
#33. History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
Johan Huizinga
#34. A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.
Johan Huizinga
#36. History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Johan Huizinga
#37. To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.
Johan Huizinga
#38. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.
Johan Huizinga
#39. One does not realize the historical sensation as a re-experiencing, but as an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather of the world by means of music.
Johan Huizinga
#40. Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
Johan Huizinga
#41. Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.
Johan Huizinga
#42. Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.
Johan Huizinga
#43. Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.
Johan Huizinga
#44. Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
Johan Huizinga
#45. In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.
Johan Huizinga
#46. All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.
Johan Huizinga
#47. Culture arises and unfolds in and as play ... culture itself bears the character of play.
Johan Huizinga
#48. Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.
Johan Huizinga
#49. Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.
Johan Huizinga
#50. Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.
Johan Huizinga
#51. But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused and, fora moment lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells.
Johan Huizinga
#52. The slogan offers a counterweight to the general dispersion of thought by holding it fast to a single, utterly succinct and unforgettable expression, one which usually inspires men to immediate action. It abolishes reflection: the slogan does not argue, it asserts and commands.
Johan Huizinga
#53. The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
Johan Huizinga
#55. The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.
Johan Huizinga
#56. Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.
Johan Huizinga
#57. The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.
Johan Huizinga
#58. People accept a representation in which the elements of wish and fantasy are purposely included but which nevertheless proclaims to represent "the past" and to serve as a guide-rule for life, thereby hopelessly confusing the spheres of knowledge and will.
Johan Huizinga
#59. Whatever our creed or belief, we all know that there is no way back, that we must fight our way through.
Johan Huizinga
#60. Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
Johan Huizinga
#61. It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
Johan Huizinga
#62. The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
Johan Huizinga
#63. Whether the aim is in heaven or on earth, wisdom or wealth, the essential condition of its pursuit and attainment is always security and order.
Johan Huizinga
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