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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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Susanne Katherina Langer
Tragedy
Comedy
Self
Consummation
Exhibits
Presents
Preservation
Vital
Rhythm

More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

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Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
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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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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.
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The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
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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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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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
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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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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Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
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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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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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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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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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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Music is our myth of the inner life.
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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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