It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
Interpretation
Heroism is recognized only after someone has sacrificed themselves, not during the struggle.
This quote by Johan Huizinga reflects on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, suggesting that those who are seen as heroes often do not perceive their own heroism while they are fighting for a cause. Instead, their bravery and the sacrifices they make are acknowledged only after their death, by those who survive them, emphasizing the disconnect between the awareness of one's heroic actions and the recognition afforded by others.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a memorial service to honor fallen heroes.
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.
Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused - hence all the old tales of elfin kingdoms moving further and further away from our world, or that magical beings require our faith, our belief in their existence, to survive. That is a lie. All they require is our recognition.
There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.
She thought about her life and how lost sheβd felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths sheβd been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?
As an adolescent I was convinced that France would have to go through gigantic trials, that the interest of life consisted in one day rendering her some signal service and that I would have the occasion to do so.
During a chess tournament a master must envisage himself as a cross between an ascetic monk and a beast of prey.
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