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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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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
Reason
Realism
Mind
Passes
Thinking
Attraction
Profound
Principles
Conveniently
Faith
Adolescent
Away
Troublesome
Doe
Seemingly

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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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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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A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
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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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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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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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Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
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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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The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
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Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
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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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A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
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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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Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
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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.
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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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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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