Johan Huizinga Quotes - Page 3

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 afrenzy 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.

The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.

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

A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.

Without claiming superiority of intellectual over visual understanding, one is nevertheless bound to admit that the cinema allowsa number of æsthetic-intellectual means of perception to remain unexercised which cannot but lead to a weakening of judgment.

Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.

But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused and, fora moment lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells.

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.

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

Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.

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

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.

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

Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

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

Under weak government, in a wide, thinly populated country, in the struggle against the raw natural environment and with the freeplay of economic forces, unified social groups become the transmitters of culture.

The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.

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.

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.

No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.

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?