Johan Huizinga Quotes

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

History is not just about dates and quotations. And it's not just about politics, the military and social issues, though much of it of course is about that. It's about everything. It's about life history. It's human. And we have to see it that way. We have to teach it that way. We have to read it that way. It's about art, music, literature, money, science, love - the human experience.

Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing.

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

There is a lot of talk in the academy about the death of the humanities. Based on my readers' response and their interest in history and literature and art, the death of the humanities has been grossly overstated.

I've memorized 'Hamilton.'

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.

I love the Smithsonian. I'm a real dork for that kind of stuff.

As far as reading is concerned, I like historical and political books and works of art.

Art history is littered with work that involves light.

My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun.

It is, indeed, perhaps the greatest prospect of humanistic studies to contribute through an increasing knowledge of the history of cultural development to that gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all science.

In what light soever we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revelation, to history, or to morality, it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

History is clarified experience.

I just read history books. I read nothing but history books. They have so much to give; I wish I'd majored in history in college.

Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS

All our knowledge is symbolic.

Experience is the mother of custom.

What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.