Johan Huizinga Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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