Susanne K Langer Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Most new discoveries are suddenly seen things that were always there.

Susanne K. Langer

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms ...

Susanne Katherina Langer

#6. One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#7. Cinema is like dream.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#11. A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.

Susanne Langer

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#15. Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#16. If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.

Susanne Langer

#17. Pioneering is the work of individuals ...

Susanne Katherina Langer

#18. Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#19. The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#23. A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#24. 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

#25. Common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#26. Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable ...

Susanne Katherina Langer

#31. 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

#32. 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