Quote

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Susanne Katherina Langer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susanne Katherina Langer
Humans
Symbolic
Forms
Creation
Feeling
Feelings
Art
Form
Human

More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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
Image
The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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
Image
The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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