Best 72 quotes of Johan Huizinga on MyQuotes

A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.

An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.

A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.

A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.

Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.

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.

Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.

Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.

Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.

Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?

Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

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 only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

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.

He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind.

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.

History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

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 seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.

If the Americans, in addition to the eagle and the Stars and Stripes and the more unofficial symbols of bison, moose and Indian, should ever need another emblem, one which is friendly and pleasant, then I think they should choose the grapefruit. Or rather the half grapefruit, for this fruit only comes in halves, I believe. Practically speaking, it is always yellow, always just as fresh and well served. And it always comes at the same, still hopeful hour of the morning.

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.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.

It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.

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.

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.

No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.

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.

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.

Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphsof psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

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.

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 outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action.

Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.

Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.

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.

The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.

The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

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.

The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.

The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.

There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense.

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.

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.

The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.