Johan Huizinga Quotes

40 quotes in 604 categories

• Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.
• If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of…
• The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.
• A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.
• Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
• 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…
• History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
• If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.
• 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.
• In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.
• The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
• 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…
• The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up…
• A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
• You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
• Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
• 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.
• The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
• Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
• The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.

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