Johan Huizinga Quotes

History is full of times when the inevitable front-runner is inevitable right up until he or she is no longer inevitable.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

Historians emphasize contingency, complexity, and the unanticipated ... Few principles apply all the time.

History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.

Small things have a way of overmastering the great. This small press can destroy a kingdom.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

I don't know that I'd necessarily want to see into the future. I don't want to know what's happening next.

History is only a feeble light, for the rubrics were meant to answer future problems unimagined and unimaginable

History is totally unpredictable.

History proceeds in zig zags through crooked paths.

One event makes another: what we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens; and time can only prove which is most for our advantage

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

History sometimes makes fun of us and our best intentions.

The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

People's lives often don't turn out as they expect.

Honestly, who knows 100 per cent what they will do next year?

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.

You can always speak with great authority on how well you played today, but never on how you'll play tomorrow.

We almost manage to forget that things happen that we don't anticipate.

The past is all we know of the future.

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.