The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up i…

- Johan Huizinga

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

- Johan Huizinga

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

- Johan Huizinga

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

- Johan Huizinga

Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.

- Johan Huizinga

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearnin…

- Johan Huizinga

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

- Johan Huizinga

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

- Johan Huizinga

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

- Johan Huizinga