Quotes by Johan Huizinga

About Johan Huizinga:

Johan Huizinga was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 ...

Johan Huizinga

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

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, harmo...

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 precaution...

Johan Huizinga

For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generally 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 precaution...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johan Huizinga

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

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

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameJohan Huizinga
  • DescriptionDutch historian
  • BornDecember 7, 1872
  • DiedFebruary 1, 1945
  • CountryNetherlands
  • ProfessionCultural Historian; Historian