Top 53 Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes
#2. Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#3. The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#5. Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#6. A mind that is very selective to forms ... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#7. The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#8. Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#10. It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#11. A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#12. The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#13. The image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art
plastic, musical, poetic, balletic
serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#14. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#17. The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#18. Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#19. Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#20. The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#21. All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#23. Magic, then, is not a method, but a language; it is part and parcel of that greater phenomenon, ritual, which is the language of religion. Ritual is a symbolic transformation of experiences that no other medium can adequately express.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#24. In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#28. The faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation ... But the facts which are accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#29. Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#30. The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#31. Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent, is the mark of mentality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#32. The wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#33. We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#34. The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#35. As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#36. Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune
Susanne Katherina Langer
#37. The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#38. Value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#39. Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#40. It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairytales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#41. If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#42. What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#43. Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant ...
Susanne Katherina Langer
#46. Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#47. Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#51. The secret of 'fusion' is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature ... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#52. The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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