Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes - Page 3

Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.

Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.

A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

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.

The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

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.

The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.

It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.

Cinema is like dream.