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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
Human
Humans
Adaptive
Play
Subordinate
Uniquely
Subordinates
Function
Special
Experience

More quotes by Johan Huizinga

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William James once said: Progress is a terrible thing. It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?
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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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
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What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
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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Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
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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The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
Johan Huizinga
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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.
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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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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Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
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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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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
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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
Johan Huizinga
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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
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The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
Johan Huizinga
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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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Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
Johan Huizinga