Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes

value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.

What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.

Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

the wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions.

Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.

The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.

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 arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.

common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.

The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

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".

Music is our myth of the inner life.

Pioneering is the work of individuals.

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth.

One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.