The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
Interpretation
Heroism is often recognized by those who remain, rather than by those who sacrifice themselves.
This quote by Johan Huizinga suggests that the concept of heroism is often conferred by the living onto those who have fallen in a conflict or struggle. The fallen may not even be aware of their bravery or the impact of their actions since heroism is often perceived after the fact by those who continue to carry the emotional and social weight of the loss.
In practice
This quote can be shared during 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.
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.
The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.
Happily ever after?" "If justice doesn't triumph and love doesn't make the circle in entertainment fiction, what's the point? Real life sucks too often.
Jesus is not a figure from the past: He continues now and always to light the way for us.
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