Johan Huizinga Quotes About History

Quotes about: History

• 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.

  Johan Huizinga

  War, Europe, History

• History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

  Johan Huizinga

  Past, Simple, History

• 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.

  Johan Huizinga

  Inspirational, Motivational, Past

  Johan Huizinga (2014). “Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance”, p.58, Princeton University Press

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

  Johan Huizinga

  Discipline, History, Portal

  Johan Huizinga (2014). “Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance”, p.39, Princeton University Press

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

  Johan Huizinga

  Past, History, Interpretation

• He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife 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

  Past, Squares, America

• Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

  Johan Huizinga

  Art, History, Historical

• 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

  Music, Mean, History

  Johan Huizinga (2014). “Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance”, p.54, Princeton University Press

• What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.

  Johan Huizinga

  Art, History, Common

  Johan Huizinga (1968). “Dutch civilisation in the seventeenth century, and other essays”

• We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, intothis susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.

  Johan Huizinga

  Spiritual, History, Judging

• If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits 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

  War, Civilization, History

• 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.

  Johan Huizinga

  Confused, History, Rose

• 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.

  Johan Huizinga

  Truth, Past, People

• 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

  Children, Distance, Sadness

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