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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

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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
Uniquely
Subordinates
Function
Special
Experience
Human
Adaptive
Humans
Play
Subordinate

More quotes by Johan Huizinga

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All seemingly profound thinking which passes for realism, because it conveniently does away with all troublesome principles, has agreat attraction for the adolescent mind.
Johan Huizinga
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The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
Johan Huizinga
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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
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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.
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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.
Johan Huizinga
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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
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Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
Johan Huizinga
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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
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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
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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
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Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?
Johan Huizinga
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The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
Johan Huizinga
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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
Johan Huizinga
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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.
Johan Huizinga
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A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
Johan Huizinga
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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
Johan Huizinga
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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
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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
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Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
Johan Huizinga
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We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.
Johan Huizinga