Johan Huizinga Quotes

40 quotes in 604 categories

• Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
• No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.
• Play: It is an an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and…
• It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.
• Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
• Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
• History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.
• An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
• You only live a short time... and you are dead a long time.
• 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…
• Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and…
• Culture means control over nature.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.
• Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
• 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,…
• In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.
• History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the formin which they have been anticipated.

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