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.
Oh, God β the lives people try to lead. Oh, God β what a world they try to lead them in.
But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.....We must not.....assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it to be arranged by God.
If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more impure.
I am a book I neither wrote nor read.
Canada is either an idea or it does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of a great empire.
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