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

Susanne Katherina Langer

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Susanne Katherina Langer
Feelings
Art
Nature
Objectification
Feeling

More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

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Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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
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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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
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The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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
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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer