Susanne Langer Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Susanne 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—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.

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

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

Susanne 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 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 Langer
The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology.

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

Susanne 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 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 Langer
The "technique," or treatment, of a problem begins with its first expression as a question. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it - right or wrong - may be given.

Susanne Langer
A question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination.

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

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

Susanne Langer
Mathematicians are rarely practical people, or good observers of events. They are apt to be cloistered souls, like philosophers and theologians.

Susanne Langer
Our world "divides into facts" because we so divide it.

Susanne Langer
The mind of man is always fertile, ever creating and discarding, like the earth. There is always new life under old decay. Last year's dead leaves hide not merely the seeds, but the full-fledged green plants of this year's spring, ready to bloom almost as soon as they are uncovered.

Susanne Langer
The men in the laboratory have departed so far from the old forms of experimentation - typified by Galileo's weights and Franklin's kite - that they cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all; instead, they are watching index needles, revolving drums, and sensitive plates.

Susanne Langer
Observation has become almost entirely indirect; and readings take the place of genuine witness.

Susanne 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 Langer
Behind these symbols lie the boldest, purest, coolest abstractions mankind has ever made. No schoolman speculating on essences and attributes ever approached anything like the abstractness of algebra.

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

Susanne Langer