63+ Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes On Education, World And Symbolic

Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher and educator whose work focused on the nature of art and the power of symbols. She was one of the first women to be accepted into the American Philosophical Association and is best known for her book, Philosophy in a New Key. Langer's work was influential in the development of American philosophy, especially in the areas of aesthetics and philosophy of mind. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer on life, love, education.

Top 10 Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes

1. 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.
2. The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
3. The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
4. The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.
5. Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
6. Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
7. 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.
8. The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
9. Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
10. If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably.

Susanne Katherina Langer Short Quotes

• Pioneering is the work of individuals.
• Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
• If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
• Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
• value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.
• Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
• Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
• Cinema is like dream.
• A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
• What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.

Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes About Life

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Music is our myth of the inner life. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes About Symbolic

Magic, then, is not a method, but a language; it is part and parcel of that greater phenomenon, ritual, which is the language of religion. Ritual is a symbolic transformation of experiences that no other medium can adequately express. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality. — Susanne Katherina Langer

A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes About Art

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art? — Susanne Katherina Langer

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms. — Susanne Katherina Langer

... 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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Susanne Katherina Langer Famous Quotes And Sayings

To trace the development of mind from earliest times ... requires ... not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation. — Susanne Katherina Langer

It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairytales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time...Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive. — Susanne Katherina Langer

One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

The faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation.... But the facts which are accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

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

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. — Susanne Katherina Langer

The power of magic has no known limits. A person knows, in a fair way, his own physical capacities, the weight of the blows he can deal, the furthest range of his arrows, the strength of his voice, the speed and endurance of his running; but the reaches of his mind are indefinite and, to his feeling, infinite. — Susanne Katherina Langer

Life Lessons by Susanne Katherina Langer

1. Susanne Katherina Langer's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the symbolic nature of language, art, and music, and how they can be used to express abstract ideas.
2. Her philosophy of art emphasizes the idea that art is a form of expression that can be used to convey complex and abstract ideas.
3. She also argues that art is an important part of life and can be used to explore and understand the world around us.