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.
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
My days β the blossom of my youth and the flower of my manhood β have been darkened by the dreariness of servitude. In this my native land β in the land of my sires β I am degraded without fault as an alien and an outcast.
Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings.
Jerusalem doesn't belong only to Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims and Jews, but to the world.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Our Constitution does not profess to have been established simply by the majority, but by 'the people' - the minority as much as the majority.
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