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Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.

Susanne Katherina Langer

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Susanne Katherina Langer
Life
Emotive
Analogue
Tonal
Music

More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

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What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
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As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
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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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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
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Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
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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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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Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
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Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
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.
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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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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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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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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
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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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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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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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.
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Music is our myth of the inner life.
Susanne Katherina Langer