Johan Huizinga Quotes

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

  Johan Huizinga

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• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Johan Huizinga

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

  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

• 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

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

  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

• 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

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

  Johan Huizinga

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

  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

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

  Johan Huizinga

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

  Johan Huizinga

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

  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

• 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

Johan Huizinga (26)

Birth:	7th December, 1872
Death:	1st February, 1945
Nationality:	Dutch
Profession:	Historian

About

Johan Huizinga was born in Groningen, Netherlands. He was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history. He started out as a student of Indo-European languages, earning his degree in 1895. He then studied comparative linguistics, gaining a good command of Sanskrit. He served as a Professor of General and Dutch History at Groningen University from 1905-1915, and then at Leiden University until 1942. He wrote several books include: The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, In the shadow of tomorrow, Homo Ludens, and Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century.

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