Johan Huizinga Quotes

“Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.”

“Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.”

“History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.”

“History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.”

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

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

“An abundance of pictorial fancy, after all, furnished the simple mind quite as much matter for deviating from pure doctrine as any personal interpretation of Holy Scripture.”

“Our point of departure must be the conception of an almost childlike play-sense expressing itself in various play-forms, some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and productive of culture by allowing the innate human need of rhythm, harmony, change, alternation, contrast and climax, etc., to unfold in full richness.”

“The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.”

“If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.”

“In today's society conformity is more of a necessity than an option.”