Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Johan Huizinga
Age: 72 †
Born: 1872
Born: January 1
Died: 1945
Died: January 1
Cultural Historian
Historian
Linguist
Philosopher
Resistance Fighter
University Teacher
J. Huizinga
Huizinga
Past
Patterns
Events
Study
Comprehensible
Happened
Coherence
Simple
Seeming
History
Reducing
Makes
Pattern
Form
Dramatic

More quotes by Johan Huizinga

Image
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
Image
The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
Johan Huizinga
Image
A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
Johan Huizinga
Image
Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
Johan Huizinga
Image
The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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
Image
Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
Johan Huizinga
Image
Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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