Johan Huizinga Quotes

History is sometimes hard. We study it and try to discover facts.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

History is what we would make of it.

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

History is always changing.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

There is a reason for everything.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.

I would say that to put architecture in the chain of history, to be able to interpret and understand why we are where we are, is quite crucial.

All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

History is a never ending argument.