It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
Interpretation
Heroism is recognized only after someone has sacrificed themselves, not during the struggle.
This quote by Johan Huizinga reflects on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, suggesting that those who are seen as heroes often do not perceive their own heroism while they are fighting for a cause. Instead, their bravery and the sacrifices they make are acknowledged only after their death, by those who survive them, emphasizing the disconnect between the awareness of one's heroic actions and the recognition afforded by others.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a memorial service to honor fallen heroes.
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.
The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
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.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.
I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.
But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.
One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.
Americans have always been able to handle austerity and even adversity. Prosperity is what is doing us in.
...religion is a tool to bind people together, to strengthen their unity, but like every tool, it can be mismanaged, even used in opposition to the way it should.
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