Susanne Langer - Life Quotes

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

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

Susanne Langer