Johan Huizinga Quotes
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.
Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.
Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.
The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.
Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.
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.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.
An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
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.
All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.
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.
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.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
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.
There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense.
The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.
In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.
Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.
The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
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.
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.
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.
Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.
The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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.
Whatever our creed or belief, we all know that there is no way back, that we must fight our way through.
The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
An abundance of pictorial fancy, after all, furnished the simple mind quite as much matter for deviating from pure doctrine as any personal interpretation of Holy Scripture.