Johan Huizinga Quotes & Sayings

Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

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

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images. — Johan Huizinga

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. — Johan Huizinga

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

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. — Johan Huizinga

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

All play means something. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

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 in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play ... We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play ... it arises in and as play, and never leaves it. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today the average inhabitant of the western hemisphere knows a little of everything. He has the newspaper on his breakfast table and wireless within reach. For the evening there is the film, cards, or a meeting to complete a day spent in the office or factory where nothing that is essential has been learnt. With slight variation this picture of a low cultural average holds good over the entire range from factory-hand of clerk to manager or director. Only the personal will to culture, in whatever field and however pursued raises modern man above this level. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

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

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

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. — Johan Huizinga

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. — Johan Huizinga

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

Our point of departure must be the conception of an almost childlike play-sense expressing itself in various play-forms, some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and productive of culture by allowing the innate human need of rhythm, harmony, change, alternation, contrast and climax, etc., to unfold in full richness. — Johan Huizinga

For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generatly it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. The Mahabharata devotes a whole chapter to the erection of the dicing hall - sabha - where the Pandavas are to meet their prtners. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual. — Johan Huizinga

You only live a short time ... and you are dead a long time. — Johan Huizinga

When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child — Johan Huizinga

Culture means control over nature. — Johan Huizinga

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

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

Whatever our creed or belief, we all know that there is no way back, that we must fight our way through. — Johan Huizinga

Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment. — Johan Huizinga

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

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

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

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

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. — Johan Huizinga

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. — Johan Huizinga

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

The whole functioning of the mediaeval University was profoundly agonistic and ludic. The everlasting disputations which took the place of our learned discussions in periodicals, etc., the solemn ceremonial which is still such a marked feature of University life, the grouping of scholars into nationes, the divisions and subdivisions, the schisms, the unbridgeable gulfs - all these are phenomena belonging to the sphere of competition and play-rules. Erasmus — Johan Huizinga