Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes & Sayings

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

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

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

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

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

Music is our myth of the inner life ... — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Pioneering is the work of individuals ... — Susanne Katherina Langer

One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time ... Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art? — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

Cinema is like dream. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

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

Common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

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

Value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters. — Susanne Katherina Langer

What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms ... — Susanne Katherina Langer

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable ... — Susanne Katherina Langer

The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal". — Susanne Katherina Langer

The power of magic has no known limits. A person knows, in a fair way, his own physical capacities, the weight of the blows he can deal, the furthest range of his arrows, the strength of his voice, the speed and endurance of his running; but the reaches of his mind are indefinite and, to his feeling, infinite. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience ... — Susanne Katherina Langer

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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