Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes

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.

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 - what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.

Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.

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.

Cinema is like dream.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.

Pioneering is the work of individuals.

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.

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.

Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

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

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

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.

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.

The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.

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

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.

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

Music is our myth of the inner life.

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

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.

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

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.

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

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.

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.

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.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.

Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.

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

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

common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.

... 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.

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.

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