Susanne Langer - Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967)

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

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

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

Susanne Langer