“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
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Wealth
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“If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures of its inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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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.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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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 a frenzy 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.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in life … must also be ready to deny his own life until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America’s mind.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after the forms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“One does not realize the historical sensation as a re-experiencing, but as an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather of the world by means of music.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“Thanks to recent trends in the theory of knowledge, history is now better aware of its own worth and unassailability than it formerly was. It is precisely in its inexact character, in the fact that it can never be normative and does not have to be, that its security lies.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, into this susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused and, for a moment lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as much as possible on official documents because the chronicles are unreliable, fall thereby into an occasionally dangerous error. The documents tell us little about the difference in tone which separates us from those times; they let us forget the fervent pathos of medieval life.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“During medieval times, all those emotions were missing which have made us cautious and tentative in matters of justice: the insight into diminished capacity, the concept of judicial fallibility, the awareness that society has to share in the blame for the guilt of individuals, the question whether an individual ought not be rehabilitated rather than made to suffer. Or, perhaps, better stated: a vague sense of all this is not lacking, but rather concentrates itself, unverbalized, in instant impulses of charity and forgiveness, unconcerned with the issue of guilt, which could suddenly break through the cruel satisfaction over the administration of justice. While we administer a hesitant, toned down justice, partially filled with a guilty conscience, the Middle Ages knew only two extremes: the full measure of cruel punishment or mercy.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or pure silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Science
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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.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Science
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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.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Science
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“The aggregate of all knowledge has not yet become culture in us. Rather it would seem as if, with the progressive scientific penetration and dissection of reality, the foundations of our thinking grow ever more precarious and unstable.”
Johan Huizinga
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Science
