Quote

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

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
High
Lower
Values
Cultural
Process
Condition
May
Defined
Overrun
Elements
Whereby
Value
Attained
Conditions
Gradually
Quality
Decay

More quotes by 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
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
The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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.
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
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.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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
Image
What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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.
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
Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.
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
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.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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.
Johan Huizinga
Image
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.
Johan Huizinga
Image
The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.
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
A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
Johan Huizinga
Image
The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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