A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
Interpretation
A new culture requires a cleansing or refinement of humanity's current state.
Johan Huizinga's quote suggests that for a new culture to emerge and thrive, there must first be a significant transformation or purification within humanity itself. This implies that existing values, beliefs, and social norms may need to be critically examined and changed to allow for the establishment of a more progressive or enlightened society. The notion is that cultural growth is intricately tied to the moral and ethical state of its people.
In practice
During a lecture on cultural evolution, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of personal and societal transformation.
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.
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 susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
Listen, you know this: If there's not a rebellious youth culture, there's no culture at all. It's absolutely essential. It is the future. This is what we're supposed to do as a species, is advance ideas.
Puerto Rico is the perfect meeting place between Spain, the country I come from, and America, the country where I now belong. The meeting point of two worlds where magic can happen.
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
Get the culture right, and everything else just falls into place.
When you talk about Lacrosse, you talk about the lifeblood of the six nations. The game is ingrained into our culture and our system and our lives. (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora)
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