Johan Huizinga Quotes

The people may be put into the way they should go, though they may not be put into the way of understanding it.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

It is difficult to say what truth is, but sometimes it is so easy to recognize a falsehood.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

People think that they see, but they don't.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!

Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.

...it was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that.

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

People b'lief the world is built so an tellin em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours.

I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it's a lie.

I think people are more apt to believe photographs, especially if it’s something fantastic. They’re willing to be more gullible. Sometimes they want fantasy. Even if they know it’s fake they can believe anything. People are accustomed to being told what to believe in.

How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.' No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

Photography threatens fantasy.

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.

In the absence of truth there is confusion, the essence of truth.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

He who does not lie does not know what truth is.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

The gods are blind. And men see only what they wish" - Tyrion Lannister