Susanne Langer Quotes
-
Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
-
Music is our myth of the inner life.
-
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".
-
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.
-
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.
-
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human 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.
-
... 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.
-
Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
-
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
-
value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.