Susanne Langer Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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.
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... 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.
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The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.
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Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
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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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Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune - what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.
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Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
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value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.
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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.
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All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.
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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.