Johan Huizinga Culture Quotations

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.

Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.

The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving.

There are no instances known to me of cultures having forsaken Truth or renounced the understanding in its widest sense.

Culture means control over nature.

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

Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.

Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.