Susanne Langer Quotes
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The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.
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Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
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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 continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
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One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.
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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.
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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.
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The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.
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Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
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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.
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The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.
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Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.
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If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
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A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
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Cinema is like dream.
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What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
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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.
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Pioneering is the work of individuals.
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Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
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Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.