Susanne Langer Quotes
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Music is our myth of the inner life.
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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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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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Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
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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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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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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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Pioneering is the work of individuals.
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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.
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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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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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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
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value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.