Quote

Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.

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
Ideals
Lasting
Concepts
Ideal
Revolution
Concept
Thought
Originals
Always
Original
Aquariums
Content
Betterment
Essential
Preserves
Essentials
Sudden

More quotes by Johan Huizinga

Image
The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
Johan Huizinga
Image
You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
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
Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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
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
Image
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
Image
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Johan Huizinga
Image
A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
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
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
Image
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.
Johan Huizinga
Image
Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
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
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
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
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
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
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