Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.
Interpretation
Play is a fundamental aspect of life that predates human culture and exists in nature.
Johan Huizinga highlights the intrinsic nature of play as an essential part of existence, which existed before human culture was formed. He suggests that play is a natural behavior seen in animals, indicating that its importance transcends human societal constructs and emphasizes the fundamental joy and creativity inherent in all living things.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of play in childhood development.
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.
Although a man may have no jurisdiction over the fact of his existence, he can hold supreme command over the meaning of existence for him.
I've always been a fan of issues around race and racialism, and I've loved playing with it. People act as though it isn't an issue, but it's a recurring theme in our lives globally.
The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.
I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.