Johan Huizinga quotes

Johan Huizinga was a Dutch historian and one of the most influential cultural theorists of the twentieth century. His seminal works, such as "The Autumn of the Middle Ages," explored the development of European culture and society. He contributed significantly to the study of cultural history and the role of play in human civilization. Here are 26 of his quotes:

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

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

Johan Huizinga

Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.

Johan Huizinga

The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America.

Johan Huizinga

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

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

Johan Huizinga

Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.

Johan Huizinga

The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.

Johan Huizinga

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

Johan Huizinga

You only live a short time... and you are dead a long time.

Johan Huizinga

Culture means control over nature.

Johan Huizinga

It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.

Johan Huizinga

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.

Johan Huizinga

In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.

Johan Huizinga

The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.

Johan Huizinga

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

It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

Johan Huizinga

An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.

Johan Huizinga

The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.

Johan Huizinga

Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.

Johan Huizinga

Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?

Johan Huizinga

Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.

Johan Huizinga