Johan Huizinga
Johan HuizingaAnalysis is a thing whereby, in order to begin, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.
Barbarization is a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and superseded by elements of lower quality.
Cinema is responsible for the art of watching having been reduced to mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree.
Cinema allows a number of aesthetic-intellectual means of perception to remain unexercised which cannot but lead to a weakening of judgment.
The City is a place that hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.
Culture arises and unfolds in and as play. Culture itself bears the character of play.
Hero is a title bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
History is a study that makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeing them in a simple form.
History is capable of predicting only that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Metaphor is essential in the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization, and the central metaphor for culture is a pathological one, based on disease and disorder.
Play is a free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life as being 'not serious', but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly.
Play is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility.
Play is characterized by a mood of rapture and enthusiasm and is accompanied by a feeling of exaltation and tension.
