Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes

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.

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.

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

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Music is our myth of the inner life ...

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

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

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

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

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 ...

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

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.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience ...

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.