Susanne Katherina Langer quotes
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“One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“Music is our myth of the inner life ...”
-- 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 -
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“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 -
“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 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 -
“Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
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“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 -
“Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
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“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 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 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 -
“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 -
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“value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
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“Pioneering is the work of individuals ...”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience ...”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable ...”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
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“The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.”
-- 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 -
“Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms ...”
-- 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 -
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“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 -
“Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.”
-- Susanne Katherina LangerSource : "Feeling and Form". Book by Susanne Katherina Langer, ch. 1, p. 27, 1953.
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“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
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“If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
“Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.”
-- Susanne Katherina LangerSource : Mind: An Essay in Human Feeling vol. 1, pt. 2, ch. 4 (1967)
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“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 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 -
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“A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.”
-- 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 -
“The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.”
-- 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 -
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“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 -
“Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.”
-- 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 -
“The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.”
-- Susanne Katherina Langer -
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“The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.”
-- 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
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