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The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.

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
Return
Desire
Past
Imaginary
Ideal
Content
Perfection

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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.
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From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.
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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.
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The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.
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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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The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.
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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.
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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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A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.
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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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Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.
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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.
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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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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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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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Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.
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Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.
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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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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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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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