Johan Huizinga Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johan Huizinga
That all science is merely a game can be easily discarded as a piece of wisdom too easily come by. But it is legitimate to enquire whether science is not liable to indulge in play within the closed precincts of its own method. Thus, for instance, the scientist's continuous penchant for systems tends in the direction of play.

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

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

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
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.

Johan Huizinga