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.
Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture.
San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus of the world - one of the really urbane communities in the United States - one of the truly cosmopolitan places and for many, many years, it always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world
Culture is the intersection of people and life itself. Its how we deal with life, love, death, birth, disappointment... all of that is expressed in culture.
People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America.
Koreans love to dance; they love to sing. If you actually know Koreans, you see how absurd the stereotype of the 'Asian robot' is. They love to laugh - they're very affectionate. Maybe because of their history of oppression, when they feel you are part of their tribe, they are intensely loyal. I love that about Koreans!
I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.