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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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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
Must
Metaphysical
Aim
Cease
Ultimate
Culture

More quotes by 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.
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Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
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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.
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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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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.
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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.
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History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
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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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Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
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What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
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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.
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We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, intothis susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.
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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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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
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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
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.
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Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
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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?
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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?
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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