Susanne Langer Quotes
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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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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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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.
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Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
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The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
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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 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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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 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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The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.
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What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
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One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.
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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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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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Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.
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Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
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If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
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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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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.
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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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A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
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Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.
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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.