Susanne Langer Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Susanne 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 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 Langer
Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not present to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of death. The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact. It is built on a wide survey of facts that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one's own life is a case in point. 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 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 Langer
Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

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

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

Susanne Langer
It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairy tales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.

Susanne Langer
To trace the development of mind from earliest times... requires... not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.

Susanne 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. Science builds its structure of hypothetical "elements" and laws of their behavior, touching on reality at crucial points.... But 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 Langer
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

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

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

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

Susanne Langer
The notion of giving something a name is the vastest generative idea that ever was conceived...

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

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

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

Susanne 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 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 Langer