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You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

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
Like
Nearly
Deny
Goodness
Justice
Beauty
Truth
Abstractions
Play
Seriousness
Mind
Abstraction

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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.
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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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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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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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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.
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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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Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
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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.
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The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
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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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An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
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