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

Susanne Katherina Langer

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Susanne Katherina Langer
Reality
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More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

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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
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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.
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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
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As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
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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
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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
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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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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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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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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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Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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
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Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Music is our myth of the inner life.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.
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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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.
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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If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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The fairytale is irresponsible it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
Susanne Katherina Langer