Susanne Katherina Langer
value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.Collection: Matter
What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.Collection: Understanding
Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.Collection: Discovery
Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.Collection: Art
Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Music
Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.Collection: Music Is
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.Collection: Doubt
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.Collection: Discrepancies Between
The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.Collection: Assessment
Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.Collection: Art
common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.Collection: Common Sense
The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Mind
The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".Collection: Real
Pioneering is the work of individuals.Collection: Pioneers
Music is our myth of the inner life.Collection: Music
The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.Collection: Lying
Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.Collection: Discovery
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.Collection: Change
One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.Collection: Able
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Expression
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Dance
Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Magic
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.Collection: Real
It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairytales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.Collection: Children
The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Philosophical
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Heart
The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.Collection: Civilization
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.Collection: Tests
The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Art
The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.Collection: Dream
Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Thinking
Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.Collection: Building Up
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.Collection: Common Sense
Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.Collection: Humanity
All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Ideas
As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.Collection: Self