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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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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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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Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
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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".
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Music is our myth of the inner life.
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Cinema is like dream.
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Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
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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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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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value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.
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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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Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
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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.