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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.

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
Judge
Judging
Tears
Transpose
Spiritual
Susceptibility
History
Intensive
Mind
Colorful
Life
Sensitivity
Repentance

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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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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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Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
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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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A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
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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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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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The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
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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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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 must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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Nelson's famous signal before the Battle of Trafalgar was not: England expects that every man will be a hero. It said: Englandexpects that every man will do his duty. In 1805 that was enough. It should still be.
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Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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