Susanne Langer Quotes
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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.
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Сommon sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.
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Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.
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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.
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The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
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Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
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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.
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Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
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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.
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The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
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As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
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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.
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Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.